Farming: A Hand Book

"Love the world. Work for nothing. / Take all that you have and be poor. / Love someone who does not deserve it," writes Wendell Berry in the persona of "the mad farmer," a conservative landsman who deeply opposes the then-current war in Vietnam and the ongoing crisis of farming and the environment. Lyric, satiric, didactic, by turns funny and earnest, the poems collected in Farming, most from the late 1960s, established Berry as a social critic and artist of the first order.