From the jacket flap:

My impressionis that we have seen, for perhpas one hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliablilty of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, ofpersons and communities.

In six new 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 fromthe land.

Berry's investigation of our use of language leads him to consider a unique and wide range of texts. In thirty pages of the title essay he considers two freshman English textbooks, Shelley, the Norton Anothology 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.

The Chinese character on the jacket of this volume depicts a man beside the sign for "word." It is the written form for xin, which Ezra Pound defined as: "Fidelity to the given word. The man here standing by his word." Such fidelity to the word, as evidenced by clarity of meaning and intent, would go far to reconnect language to life. Without a renewed sense of language we cannot hope to restore balance, harmony, and coherence to our lives, our land, and our communities, for these must be joined "as marriage joins them--in words by which a man or woman can stand, words confirmable in acts."

Jacket design by David Bullen. Jacket illustration by Masa Snyder. 213 pages.

Contents:

1. The Specialization of Poetry

2. Standing by Words

3. People, Land, and Community

4. Notes: Unspecializing Poetry

5. Poetry and Place

6. Poetry and Marriage