Clearing includes history quite as specific, localized and personal, yet runs no comparable risk. All his work in verse and prose is sustained by a pervasive vision, as much ethical as aesthetic, that gives weight and substance and depth to any thing or any figure named in it. The old-fashioned word for this was dedication; and it is consistent with Berry's freedom from trendy sophistication that his opening poem, "History," should include an invocation to the Muse. His historical preoccupations become critical in the next poem, "Where," with its accounts of the antecedents of the place he celebrates throughout the collection, his Kentucky farm. Here documentary faithfulness stretches the "objective correlative"—or rather the "subjective correlative," since his material is facts—to its limit, yet he gets away with it because the setting down of these facts of ownership, exploitation or "nurture" of land, are crucial to his...