The books I choose to review are books I recommend. Usually they will be books listed by relatively few and/or books previously unreviewed on LibraryThing. Among the 300 or so books by contemporary poets that I have catalogued, the one I find myself returning to most often is probably The Wheel by Wendell Berry. Berry is a Kentucky farmer, devoted to his neighborhood, his farming, and the language and vision of his people. He writes stories of Kentucky farm folk, essays explaining, reflecting upon, and defending his way of life, and simple, down-to-earth, yet profound poetry.

The Wheel, like much of his poetry, is elegiac in tone. "Though the green fields are my delight," he writes in the opening poem of this collection, "elegy is my fate." This poem is entitled, "Requiem," and the next one is simply "Elegy," an imagined conversation with a long-time friend and mentor, recently deceased. In words the poet ascribes to him, the friend "assumed / for one last time, in one last kindness, / the duty of the older man." The last thing we learn from our fathers and surrogate fathers is how to die, how to face the fact of mortality, our own and our loved ones'. The third poem in the collection, "Rising," dedicated to yet another mentor, spells out Berry's thematic statement. "Any man's death could end the story," he says; yet in the next stanza he continues, "But this is not the story of a life. / It is the story of lives knit together, / overlapping in succession." Through grief, Berry seems to maintain, we sense "the intelligence of life."

Berry has learned from poets like Wordsworth, Whitman, and Robert Frost, that the most elegant language is everyday language, spoken and understood by common folk. No pretense. No figurative complexity.

At the first steps of the fiddle bow
the dancers rise from their seats.
The dance begins to shape itself
in the crowd, as couples join,
and couples join couples, their movement
together lightening their feet.

These are the beginning lines of the title poem, "The Wheel," the first in a sequence of four that develop the image of an old-time folk dance, ultimately an image of community, of family, of love and marriage, of generations, of time and the timeless. In the dance of life, the wheel that keeps on turning, partners join and are joined by others, "we whom you know, others we remember / whom you do not remember, others / forgotten by us all."

Time and again, I am drawn back to Berry's poems, his language and images, his recurrent themes, his vision, the eloquence of his simplicity. My copy of this collection is the little soft-bound volume issued by North Point Press of San Francisco in 1982, enfolded in a rich green jacket. It just fits in the palm of one's hand. Somehow it seems to be just what a poetry book should be, the one we all wish we could have produced. To us collectors, the book as artifact--how it feels in one's hand, how it looks to the eye--is a part of its pleasure. Words on paper, yes. Images in the mind, yes. But also immediate sense impressions: weight, texture, shape, color, design, sturdy yet fragile at the same time, simple but elegant. The Wheel feels right in my hand, and in my heart. "By silence, so, / I learn my song. I earn / my sunny fields by absence, once / and to come." ( )