Clearing is familiar history; ecology; memoir: a poem about the making of a poem—the making of two poems, the one we read and the other: a farm and forty acres…. Berry is the most subtle of American naturists. The vocabulary of his emotion is even-tempered; far from unpoetic, he deprecates the more showy forensics that have commonly underlined his subject: despoliation and the way back. Clearing is a ruminating lyrical monologue in seven principal sections, delivered by a man who has chosen at great cost—in the worldly meaning, beside the expense of spirit entailed—to do as well as to be or to talk: actively to conserve, not be content with polemics on conservation. And the consequence—never achieved, always in process of achievement—is far from satisfying the poet who thinks, as it does satisfy the man who toils. "Work Song," the most troubled, and the most musical, sequence of the narrative, discloses the anxiety at the heart of Berry's expenditure—anxious not only for the future, which will not be in his hands; anxious over the present in which he is being devoured by his own commitment…. There lies the poet's fear, as dark as dark. He has cut the brush, fenced and sown the fields, brought crops back to the bottom land, and he asks if his labors might not, eventually, absorb him, lead him quite away from the life of books, from reading them, from making them…. No fate more mocking than to be halved between one's vocations; to be torn asunder by equally compelling duties; no worse despair than a writer's when not writing what he feels he ought. Clearing is thereby more than a lyric of ecological resurrection, though it is beautifully that; it is the expressive chronicle of a man who sought unity, stricken by division. (pp. 579-81)