The word “verse” has an agricultural past: it comes from the Latin word for “furrowing” or “turning up the soil.” Language, then, is a field ready for the plow; a poem is the careful turning up of that field. A poem must break up the dry outer crush of assumptions to expose the fertile soil underneath.

Wendell Berry, whose poems we are honored to feature here, is a well-known essayist and novelist, a life-long farmer, and a great champion of the particular and human against impersonal, mechanized social and economic forces. He is also a masterful poet. For over sixty years, Berry has turned to verse to explore the rhythms and patterns that make up human life.

In this series of new poems, the guiding concerns of Berry’s life merge.