From the Front Flap:

The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cezanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he's alive
forever, this instant, and may be.

Given is Wendell Berry's first collection of new poems in ten years. As rich and varied as any before, this book is divided into four parts. We begin with a collection of short occasional pieces ranging from political cautions to love poems and celebrations. Then follows a play in verse, "Sonata at Payne Hollow," a beautiful evocation of the lives of the painter Harlan Hubbard and his wife Anna. Over the past twenty-five years Mr. Berry has been at work on a long sequence of poems that has resulted from his Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation, and this present volume concludes with eight year's worth of new "Sabbath Poems."

For five decades Wendell Berry has been a poet of great clarity and purpose. He is a writer whose imagination is grounded by the pastures of his chosen place and the rooms and porches of his family's home. His work is one of devotion, to family and community, to the earth and her creatures, to the memories of the past and the hope of the future. His work stands alongside William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost as a rigorous American testament.

Jacket design by David Bullen. Cover illustration: Still Life by Giorgio Morandi. 152 pages.

Contents

Part I: In a Country Once Forested

Dust
In a Country Once Forested
Spring Haiku
To Tanya on My Sixtieth Birthday
They
Cathedral
Dante
All
The Fact
The Millenium
June Wind
A Small Theology
Why
The Rejected Husband
The Inlet
Listen!
In Art Rowanbery's Barn
A Stone Jug
Burley Coulter's Song for Kate Helen Branch
How To Be a Poet
Words
To a Writer of Reputation

Part II: Further Words

Seventy Years
A Position
A Passing Thought
The Leader
The Ongoing Holy War against Evil
The Future
Some Further Words
Lysimachia Nummularia
Original Sin

Part III: Sonata at Payne Hollow

Part IV: Sabbaths 1998-2004

Sabbaths 1998, I-X
Sabbaths 1999, I-IX
Sabbaths 2000, I-X
Sabbaths 2001, I-VI
Sabbaths 2002, I-X
Sabbaths 2003, I-XI
Sabbaths 2004, I-X