Given
Poems

A moving collection of poems that celebrate the land, family, and community by one of America's most acclaimed and beloved writers.

For five decades Wendell Berry has been a poet of great clarity and purpose. He is an award-winning writer whose imagination is grounded by the pastures of his chosen place and the rooms and porches of his family's home. In Given, the work is as rich and varied as ever before. With his unmistakable voice as the constant, he dexterously maneuvers through a variety of forms and themes--political cautions, love poems, a play in verse, and a long series of Sabbath Poems that resulted from Berry's recent Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.

Berry's 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 writing stands alongside the work of William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost as a rigorous American testament.

"Mr. Berry is a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau." --The Baltimore Sun

" Berry's poems] shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life." --The Bloomsbury Review

" Berry's] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America's agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal." --Publishers Weekly