Given : Poems

Wendell Berry's first book of new poems in 10 years� a rich and varied new collection� is cause for celebration.

As the New York Times Book Review noted, "Berry's straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament . . . affirms a style that is resonant with the authentic. . . . He can be said to have returned American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose."For the past 25 years Berry has been at work on a long sequence, "The Sabbath Poems," resulting from his Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation, and we have been collecting the unpublished sequences for the past eight years.

Here also is a play in verse, Sonata at Payne Hollow, a startling evocation of the lives of Harlan and Anna Hubbard.

But half of this varied collection contains shorter pieces, ranging from political poems to folk sayings (fans will be delighted by the new "Sayings and Doings), from love poems to celebrations.