Northpoint Press books are always good to look at. These four are handsome, and all the same size so they sit companionably and harmoniously in the bookshelf. Or each can be balanced neatly in the palm. Which is as it should be for the work of Wendell Berry.

Two of these books are selections, the visible part of a career’s output which also includes three novels, Nathan Coulter, The Memory of Old Jack, and A Place on Earth. Naturally, there are omissions which any given reader might regret. I miss, for example, an essay, “A Secular Pilgrimage,” from the 1975 collection A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural on the upsurge of nature poetry. But this is a rich gathering.

Berry is well-known in environmental circles as an untiring and eloquent advocate of “sustainable” farming methods. But he is not as well-known as he should be to the rest of us for what he is: one of our most versatile and prolific writers.

Why isn’t he better known? Perhaps in a country that admires excess and consumption, rapidly changing excitement, and the quick fix, Berry’s virtues of discipline, balance, and responsible restraint might seem old-fashioned and “irrelevant.” As might his use of certain uncurrent words. In his essays on poetry in Standing by Words, as in his essays on the land in Recollected Essays, Berry has loaded words such as “Sin,” “pride,” “ignorance,” ” love,” “obedience” with a new/old meaning, and uses these words naturally and unself-consciously.

He takes words as seriously as he takes farming, and for him poets are the bearers of our culture. The true poet has “larger responsibilities.” He works from and embodies a concept of order (by which he means “the possibility of responsible action”), and an “ecological intelligence” of temperance and obligation superior to himself. In closely argued, original, and passionate essays in Standing by Words, Berry castigates the egotism of the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth and Shelley, while asserting that our richest and most responsible tradition is to be found in such writers as Milton, Dante, Pope. He has little time for the modern “specialization of poetry,” and the “religion of art.”

It is no accident that Berry admires Milton and Dante, since he too is possessed of an eschatological imagination. The great truths of Christianity are reworked into an environmental ethic in the largest sense, an ordering of the world that can best be described as hierarchic, a “just hierarchy,” not the inflexible or totalitarian kind: a kind of updated Great Chain of Being. There is no need to make up such laws, Berry says. We just need to rediscover them. Because there is an absolute truth: the truth of the nature of our existence on earth. An ecological truth. Berry’s aim in everything he writes, from story to essay to poem, is to “restore the broken connections” through love, right work, and community.

To some, his method of restoration by means of a return to the land might seem utopian (and sometimes his tone might seem too austere, too relentless, too much of a jeremiad). And it is clear that some of his roots are deep in a specific Southernness, in, for example, the anti-industrial critique of the Agrarians (the title of Standing by Words recalls l’ll Take My Stand). To others, Berry might seem something of an anachronism when, in an era of massive agribusiness, he advocates using horses instead of tractors. Certainly, there is something Jeffersonian about him. In one essay, he points out with approval the two Jeffersonian principles “indispensable to democracy”: education, and the crucial importance to the state of the small landowner—of which Berry is one himself, working his Kentucky farm, healing the land depleted by centuries of neglect and abuse. However we react to Berry, his informed and intelligent analysis of our affluent society is worth heeding. If, in our largely urban society, we cannot easily see how we can return to the land, we can take away with us Berry’s emphasis on “restoring the wholeness of work” (“work is the health of love” —Berry’s many aphorisms stay in the mind). Something can be done about our destructive history, even if it is only understanding it.

Berry’s themes do not vary from book to book, or from genre to genre. There is an interweaving and a kind of spiritual manuring. Nothing is wasted. Everything gets recycled and renewed. If there is one main theme Berry starts from it is that “we have been for some time in a state of general cultural disorder and that this disorder has now become critical.” This disintegration is seen in all aspects of society, from language (the theme of Standing by Words) to the basic biological or cultural unit, marriage or domestic order (two of Berry’s most impressive essays are “Poetry and Marriage” in Standing by Words, and “The Body and the Earth,” with its moving interpretation of the Odyssey, in Recollected Essays).

Whether he is writing about canoeing on the Kentucky River or hiking the Red River Gorge; buying or repairing a home; writing stories about Wheeler Catlett; telling stories of his childhood; writing about “Discipline and Honor”; writing about form in poetry and culture; making poems distinguished for their scope and detail—or on any other subjects, in whatever form, Wendell Berry is extraordinary. In one of his essays he says that “to live in the place that is one’s subject is to pass through the surface.”

Berry passes through the surface of everything he cares about. Which is just about everything. And he is accessible. The style of his writing is always elegant and balanced, always passionate. It doesn’t call attention to itself, and the subject shines through. Always we sense “an eagerness that is felt only by those who are doing what they want passionately to do,” the eagerness of a man whose aim is ” a decent, open, generous relation between a man’s life and the world.” His poem “The Silence” asks the question: “What must a man do to be at home in the world?” Everything Berry has written attempts to answer that question.

At one point, Berry notes that he has been accused of tilting at windmills. “It is a hard world, hostile to the values that you stand for.” His response is to note that, first, regeneration can begin now, at home, by our becoming answerable to at least some of our own needs, by learning what those needs are, and ” by refusing the glamorous and the frivolous.” And then he decides it is perfectly all right to tilt at windmills “that draw the lifeblood out of our veins,” for they represent acts of a uselessly applied destructive science, and its machines. Berry takes his stand for an old humanism; for the resuscitation of an ancient knowledge. He holds out hope. For even though we are still ” a long way from any large-scale regeneration.., we are apparently near the end of a degenerative phase of an evolutionary process.”

THE WILD BIRDS
SIX STORIES OF THE PORT WILLIAMS MEMBERSHIP
Wendell Berry
Northpoint, $13.95, 146 pp.

COLLECTED POEMS 1957-1982
Wendell Berry
Northpoint, $16.50, 268 pp.

STANDING BY WORDS
ESSAYS
Wendell Berry
Northpolnt, $20, 213 pp.

RECOLLECTED ESSAYS 1965-1980
Wendell Berry
Northpoint, $18, 340 pp.