"Imagination in Place" reviewed

new Wendell Berry: Imagination in Place (Hearts & Minds Books).

Imagination in Place is, on the face of it, popular literary criticism. Each chapter is about a poet or novelist or writer he admires. However, there is a deeper theme here (although even a random collection of Berry's admiration of and friendship with different writers would itself be great.) Each of the writers he describes here are writers of place. Wallace Stegner on the American Southwest, or Ernest Gaines and his Louisiana plantations, or Donald Hall's New England are the sorts of well-known novelists or poets he celebrates. Berry laments (the dust jacket says) "today's dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and the literary sense." READ MORE ...