Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

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  Openings: Poems

  Wendell Berry

  In Openings, Wendell Berry speaks as a citizen, farmer, husband, and father and as a man deeply concerned about the state of the nation. He writes both to celebrate the natural world and to warn of the destruction we inflict on it. He writes about our responsibilities to ourselves and to one another and about America's misuses of power. He writes, in poems that are tender and passionate, of love for his wife and of the pleasures and anxieties of parenthood. In a highly acclaimed extended sequence entitled "Window Poems" he weaves together all of his dominant themes.

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  Our Only World: Ten Essays

  Wendell Berry

  In this new collection of ten essays, Berry confronts head-on the necessity of clear thinking and direct action. Never one to ignore the present challenge, he understands that only clearly stated questions support the understanding their answers require. For more than fifty years we've had no better spokesman and no more eloquent advocate for the planet, for our families, and for the future of our children and ourselves.

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  Port William Novels and Stories

  Wendell Berry

  For more than fifty years, in eight novels and fortytwo short stories, Wendell Berry (b. 1934) has created an indelible portrait of rural America through the lens of Port William, Kentucky, one of the most fully imagined places in American literature. Taken together, these novels and stories form a masterwork of American prose: straightforward, spare, and lyrical. Now, for the first time, in an edition prepared in consultation with the author, Library of America is presenting the complete story of Port William in the order of narrative chronology. This first volume, which spans from the Civil War to World War II, gathers the novels Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 1985), A Place on Earth (1967, revised 1983), A World Lost (1996), and Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006), along with twenty-three short stories, among them such favorites as "Watch With Me," "Thicker than Liquor," and "A Desirable Woman." It also features a newly researched chronology of Berry?s life and career, a map and a Port William Membership family tree, and helpful notes

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  Recollected Essays, 1965-1980

  Wendell Berry

  These eleven essays were selected by the author from five previous collections.

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  Remembering: A Novel

  Wendell Berry

  After losing his right hand in a farm accident, Andy Catlett realizes a renewed sense of kinship with the land and the past.

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  Roots to the Earth

  Wendell Berry

  In 1995, Wendell Berry's Roots to the Earth was published in portfolio form by West Meadow Press. The wood etchings of celebrated artist and wood engraver, Wesley Bates, were printed from the original wood blocks on handmade Japanese paper. In 2014, this work was reprinted along with additional poems. Together with Bates' original wood engravings, and designed by Gray Zeitz, Larkspur Press printed just one hundred copies of this book in a stunning limited edition. Now it is with great pleasure that Counterpoint is reproducing this collaborative work for trade publication, as well as expanding it with the inclusion of a short story, "The Branch Way of Doing," with additional engravings by Bates. In his introduction to the 2014 collection, Bates wrote: "As our society moves toward urbanization, the majority of the population views agriculture from an increasingly detached position ... In his poetry [Berry] reveals tenderness and love as well as anger and uncertainty ... The wood engravings in this collection are intended to be companion pieces to ... the way he expresses what it is to be a farmer."

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  Sabbaths

  Wendell Berry

  Written in the solitude of his hillside study over seven years of Sabbaths, these are poems of deep spirituality, meshing the metaphysical and the natural worlds.

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  Sayings & Doings and an Eastward Look

  Wendell Berry

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  Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays

  Wendell Berry

  In this new collection of essays, Wendell Berry continues his work as one of America’s most necessary social commentators. With wisdom and clear, ringing prose, he tackles head-on some of the most difficult problems which face us as we near the end of the twentieth century.

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  Some Differences

  Wendell Berry

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  Stand By Me

  Wendell Berry

  On a clear Kentucky night in 1888, a young woman risks her life to save a stranger from a drunken mob. Almost a hundred years later, her great-grandson Andy climbs a hill at the edge of town, and is flooded with memories of all he has lived, seen and heard of the past century - of farmers wooing schoolteachers and soldiers trudging home from war; of the first motor car, the Great Depression and Vietnam; of neighbourly feuds and family secrets; of grief and betrayal - and of great friendship that endures for a lifetime.

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  Standing by Words: Essays

  Wendell Berry

  In six essays, Wendell Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever-widening cleft between words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals from their communities and of their communities from the land. In thirty pages of the title essay, Berry considers two freshman English textbooks, Shelley, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, King Lear, Robert Herrick, the Bible, transcriptions of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Three-Mile Island crisis, an article on dairy cattle, R. Buckminster Fuller, Milton, Faulkner, and Lao Tzu, among others.

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  Standing on Earth: Selected Essays

  Wendell Berry

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  The Art of Loading Brush:New Agrarian Writings

  Wendell Berry

  Wendell Berry's profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this new gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of Agrarian philosophy. Mr. Berry believes that American cultural problems are nearly always aligned with their agricultural problems, and recent events have shone a terrible spotlight on the divides between our urban and rural citizens. Our communities are as endangered as our landscapes. There is, as Berry outlines, still much work to do, and our daily lives--in hope and affection -- must triumph over despair. Mr. Berry moves deftly between the real and the imagined. The Art of Loading Brush is an energetic mix of essays and stories, including "The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age," which explores Agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World" is added here as the bookend of this developing New Agrarianism. Four stories from an as-yet-unfinished novel, better described as "an essay in imagination," extend the Port William story as it follows Andy Catlett throughout his life to this present moment. Andy works alongside his grandson in "The Art of Loading Brush," one of the most moving and tender stories of the entire Port William cycle. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.

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  The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

  Wendell Berry

  Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes—an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geo-biography—these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture.

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  The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982

  Wendell Berry

  Wendell Berry is a writer of great clarity and sureness. His love of language and his care for its music are matched only by his fidelity to the subjects he has written of during his first twenty-five years of work : land and nature, the family and community, tradition as the groundwork for life and culture. His graceful elegies sit easily alongside lyrics of humor and biting satire. Husbandman and husband, philosopher and Mad Farmer, he writes of values that endure. His vision is one of hope and memory, of determination and faithfulness. For this volume Wendell Berry has collected nearly two hundred poems from his previous eight collections.

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  The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays, Cultural and Agricultural

  Wendell Berry

  The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still with us and the solutions no nearer to hand. One of the insistent themes of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, the land, weather, animals, and family. To touch one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture.

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  The Gift of Gravity: Selected Poems, 1968-2000

  Wendell Berry

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  The Hidden Wound

  Wendell Berry

  With the expected grace of Wendell Berry comes The Hidden Wound, an essay about racism and the damage it has done to the identity of our country. Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains how remaining passive in the face of the struggle of racism further corrodes America’s potential. In a quiet and observant manner, Berry opens up about how his attempt to discuss racism is rooted in the hope that someday the historical wound will begin to heal.

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  The Landscape of Harmony

  Wendell Berry

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  The Long-Legged House

  Wendell Berry

  Three essays at the heart of this volume—“The Rise,” “The Long-Legged House,” and “A Native Hill”—are essays of homecoming and memoir, as the writer finds his home place, his native ground, his place on earth.

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  The Mad Farmer Poems

  Wendell Berry

  During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he's found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings-these are often funny in spite of themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as he is regrettable.

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  The Memory of Old Jack

  Wendell Berry

  In a rural Kentucky river town, "Old Jack" Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the sades of one burnished day in September 1952. Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live from it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values Americans strive to recapture as we arrive at the next century.

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  The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford

  Wendell Berry

  Acclaimed essayist and poet Wendell Berry was born and has always lived in a "provincial" part of the country without an established literary culture. In an effort to adapt his poetry to his place of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry discovered an enduringly useful example in the work of William Carlos Williams. In Williams' commitment to his place of Rutherford, New Jersey, Berry found an inspiration that inevitably influenced the direction of his own writing.
  
  Both men would go on to establish themselves as respected American poets, and here Berry sets forth his understanding of that evolution for Williams, who in the course of his local membership and service, became a poet indispensable to us all.

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  The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

  Wendell Berry

  Contains one hundred poems by award-winning American poet Wendell Berry, drawn from nine previous collections.