Review by Madeline Salmon
Wendell Berry's collection of 19 poems about how to live simply in a society increasingly tainted by technology and politics takes some getting used to. The poems are, after all, narrated by a farmer a few kernels short of a corncob.
At first I could only find myself thinking, What's his angle? And while I noticed moments of beauty in the first few poems, the mundane moments and sights he chose to celebrate weren't quite enough for me.
But as I read on in The Mad Farmer Poems I found myself swept up in those earthly glories, and seeing them, at least for a moment, through the Farmer's eyes. By the end of the brief book I longed to cut myself off from the world as we know it and live isolated from technology and bureaucracy--"to be a true human being," in the Farmer's words. And even as I longed to be a true human being I ached with the knowledge that I never would be, because even the Farmer acknowledges that it is no longer possible, not with the complexity and globalization of this world we live in, and not with the comforts I have come to depend on.
The Farmer certainly does have an angle, presumably the angle of Berry himself: don't let the politicos and marketers control you. "Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing." It wasn't difficult to succumb to the ravings of this lunatic, which are much more pleasant than the rants one might encounter in any given media outlet. And the Farmer's goal is honorable:
"My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing."
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