Wendell Baerry has become ''mad'' at contemporary society. Gleaned from various collections of this amazing American voice, the poems take the shape of manifestos, insults, and Whitmanic ravings that are often funny in spite of themselves. The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of humor to bring even the most terrible consequences into an otherwise unobtainable focus.

During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open–ended sequence he's found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings—these are often funny in spite of themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as he is regrettable. Here are gathered the individual poems from Berry's various collections to offer the teachings of this amazing American voice. After the great success of the lovely Window Poems, Bob Baris of the Press on Scroll Road returns to design and produce an edition illustrated with etchings by Abigail Rover. James Baker Hall and William Kloefkorn offer poems here that also show how the Mad Farmer has escaped into the work of others. The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of anger and humor to bring even the most terrible consequences into a focus otherwise impossible to obtain.

First published in 1971, The Country of Marriage is Wendell Berry's fifth volume of poetry. What he calls "an expansive metaphor" is "a farmer's relationship to his land as the basic and central relation of humanity to creation." "Similarly, marriage is the basic and central community tie; it begins and stands for the relation we have to family and to the larger circles of human association. And these relationships are in turn basic to, and may stand for, our relationship to God and to the sustaining mysteries and powers of creation." Each of the thirty–five poems in this collection is concerned with this metaphor. The long sequence that is itself entitled "The Country of Marriage," perhaps the finest single work in the book, is a grave, moving, and beautifully wrought love poem. But the shorter lyrics have an equal grace and beauty—writing that contains the exhilarating lucidity of mountain spring water. And there are most notably, several more poems about the "Mad Farmer," who advises us here to 'every day do something that won't compute.' Berry has here perfected a work that is immediately accessible but that becomes, as we read it again, always more satisfying, reverberant with manifold meanings.

This rich volume reflects the development of Berry's poetic sensibility. ''the Selected Poems of Wendell Berry makes available cartloads and heaps of clear and fluent work from Berry's fourteen books of poetry and four decades of writing, closely documenting the inner and the visible lives Berry sees and feels in agriculture and in nature.''

Berry's themes are reflections of his life: friends, family, the farm, the nature around us as well as within. He speaks strongly for himself and sometimes for the lost heart of the country. As he has borne witness to the world for eight decades, what he offers us now in this new collection of poems is of incomparable value.

Composed while Wendell Berry looked out the multipaned window of his writing studio, this early sequence of poems contemplates Berry’s personal life as much as it ponders the seasons he witnessed through the window. First designed and printed on a Washington hand press by Bob Barris at the Press on Scroll Road, Window Poems includes elegant wood engravings by Wesley Bates that complement the reflective and meditative beauty of Berry’s poems.