... overabundance.¹

Copyright 1986 by Jeffery Triggs. All rights reserved.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

... protest.²

Roberts French once described Berry's poems as ``pastorals of withdrawal'' (``From Maine to Kentucky'' 473), commenting that Berry ``preaches incessantly at us'' and that ``one soon has enough of it'' (473). These remarks are far from just. Berry's return to country life can hardly be called a withdrawal from reality, for in fact it brings him regularly into intimate contact with the hardest realities nature has to offer. Edwin Fussell writing in a pressurized airplane somewhere over California is much more withdrawn from the reality of life on earth, as indeed so many of us are who live the climate-controlled lives of the modern industrial world. And one might add that the hysterical avoidance of anything which even approximates ``preaching'' is itself a form of withdrawal from any role in the real affairs of the world. The poet-specialist, under such a view, must confine himself to the masturbatory manipulation of words without regard for audience or even the public meanings of his words. And yet, as Berry might argue, this narrow view of the poetic function invalidates much of the greatest poetry ever written. Indeed, Berry has never invited the rest of us home to his farm. As he puts it in one of the poems of A Part (1980): ``In the labor of the fields / longer than a man's life / I am at home. Don't come with me. / You stay home too'' (Poems 199.)

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.