SOURCE: Christophersen, Bill. Review of In Deep: Country Essays, by Maxine Kumin. Prairie Schooner 63, no. 4 (winter 1989): 131-33.

In the following review, Christophersen contrasts In Deep: Country Essays with Wendell Berry's Home Economics, highlighting the respective strengths and weaknesses of each.

Wendell Berry and Maxine Kumin both operate small farms and write poems, stories, novels, and essays that embrace rural life. Now each has published another volume of essays elaborating this attachment. While Berry's Home Economics wrestles with ecological, social, and philosophical questions concerning (among other things) the small farmer's demise, Kumin's In Deep dotes on the minute particulars of horse rearing, moreling, jack breeding, and fence building.

Most of the fourteen pieces that constitute Home Economics are essays in the original (French) sense of the word—testing grounds for ideas. In “Getting Along with Nature,” Berry charts a middle path between the industrialists, who would consume nature, and...