[In the following review, Christophersen contrasts In Deep: Country Essays with Wendell Berry's Home Economics, highlighting the respective strengths and weaknesses of each.]

Wendell Berry and Maxine Kumin both operate small farms and write poems, stories, novels, and essays that embrace rural life. Now each has published another volume of essays elaborating this attachment. While Berry's Home Economics wrestles with ecological, social, and philosophical questions concerning (among other things) the small farmer's demise, Kumin's In Deep dotes on the minute particulars of horse rearing, moreling, jack breeding, and fence building.

Most of the fourteen pieces that constitute Home Economics are essays in the original (French) sense of the word—testing grounds for ideas. In “Getting Along with Nature,” Berry charts a middle path between the industrialists, who would consume nature, and the environmentalists, who would seal off what's left of it. Balancing anecdote with analysis, he argues that to regard either nature or civilization as an escape from the other is to subscribe to an “opposition that threatens to destroy them both.” “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground” walks an equally fine line, contending that today's married couples, no longer homesteaders, tend to be mates rather than “helpmates” in a mutual venture—and so remain fundamentally disunited.

Berry's sociopolitical outlook is radical, though his values are as traditional as a mullah's. Quoting Scripture and touting Amish cooperativeness and a subsistence economy, he lambastes post-war, corporate America, which, he argues, has jettisoned and betrayed even such conservative ideals as family, community, and private proprietorship. In “Property, Patriotism and National Defense,” he notes the shrinking percentage of Americans who own (or can reasonably hope to own) homes or land, the gobbling up of the small farmer and shopkeeper by big business, and the unraveling of community ties, then asks whether the way of life our politicians extol—and presume to protect with billion-dollar defense budgets—even exists anymore. In another essay he characterizes rural America as a domestic colony whose population and resources are exploited by the larger society. At such moments Berry sounds a bit like a latter-day William Jennings Bryan, angry at a system that, by selling out the farmer, has in some measure forsaken its humanity.

Home Economics has a few weak spots. Husbandman that he is, Berry tends to recycle certain crotchets from one essay to the next. And however astute his critique of modern America, his 40-acres-and-a-mule mindset seems—well, mulish. But the book's thoughtful intensity and plain spoken insight make this voice-of-one-crying-in-the-postindustrial-wilderness something to be reckoned with.

Maxine Kumin's essays, while not as provocative, offer the pleasures of country life painstakingly rendered and recollected:

Now we revel in pots and pans depending from hooks over the stove, in garlic and onion braids festooning the window, dried-mushroom necklaces decorating the rafters. … We are no longer ashamed of appetite and odor.

(“The Country Kitchen”)

In Deep is an album thick with snapshots of mares foaling and herons landing, maple sugar flowing and heifers napping in the snow. Some of its essays are informative as well as charming. In “The Mushroom Hunt,” Kumin teaches us to appreciate the finer points of puffballs and to distinguish between mushrooms with names like chicken-of-the-woods, pig's trotter, and Medusa-head (“large, fleshy masses in the shape of an ox's heart” that can weigh twenty pounds). In Deep is rich, too, in personal detail: the evolution of Kumin's love affair with horses, for instance, and with Henry David Thoreau's particularistic prose. Her own writing, indeed, echoes Thoreau's earthiness: “I find mucking out stalls each morning a fine and private time for thinking,” she asserts in “Bringing Up Boomerang”; “the poet in me is fed.”

What these essays lack, however, is Thoreau's fertile reflectiveness and editorial acumen. Some of Kumin's nostalgic reminiscences can cloy—how, for example, as a 10-year-old, she used to sneak down to the basement at night to curl up with the family pup. And while as a rule her prose is enlivened by the tropes she employs, some of these—the horse whose back is “a topography of saddle sores,” or the filly “fast as greased lightning”—were better put to pasture. The nearest thing to an idea Kumin presents us with, meanwhile, is an ultimately sway-backed comparison between mules and poets. In Deep does, however, illumine the relationship between Kumin's life and poetry:

My daily life provides a metaphor for my work, allowing me instant access at all times, crosshatching reality with the snail tracks of the unconscious, enabling me to pull poems up out of the well of the commonplace. …

In the same essay (“A Sense of Place”), Kumin also confesses,

Clearly the impulse for poems is here for me, in the vivid turn of the seasons, in the dailiness of growing things. … Without religious faith and without the sense of primal certitude that faith brings, I must take my only comfort from the natural order of things.

The book's elegant title piece suggests, to be sure, that the comfort she speaks of must, at moments, be wrested from thickets of doubt. But one senses too that for Kumin this comfort suffices.