In his Selected Poems, Wendell Berry makes an profound argument for falling back in mad love with the earth, for resurrecting the wild. He shares his experience of the land as intimate teacher -- a sycamore is a guide to the sublime, a spill of rocks in the slope sings him a history, the river is his lessoner in the dark mysteries of change. His poems are steeped in the strong tea of the earth, they are rich and weighty with the soil they reflect, with the waters that pour across his landscape. Like any honest nature-driven writer, he knows that we cannot possibly give adequate voice to the very thing we wish to describe: "The world is greater than our words," he says -- and yet, and yet, he tries to embrace it whole.

Themes of fear and fury course through this collection of Berry's work, as he faces directly the griefs of losing life, of losing the land that he loves. Yet upwelling even in the midst of death's river is his faith in the natural cycle:

Admit the native earth My body is and will be, Admit its freedom and Its changeability.

and

The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest... it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild.

In his Selected Poems, Berry takes us with him in his journey through time within space, through struggle for integration, for understanding, for acceptance. He exposes his anger, and horror, and then the numinous Mystery that rises from the earth, and waits quietly singing.