Will I love Jayber Crow?

The argument against everything I did…almost. Jayber stays.

One town, one river, one unrequited love, a whole life lived inside five miles—and Berry makes it enormous. I took my children across a continent to show them something; Berry would say the thing worth showing was always at home, and you only see it by staying long enough to be shaped by it.

I think he's half right, and the half he's right about is the half I'm worst at. He wants us out of the machinery and back into the land, and into the people on it. I had to… show more.

The story of a seemingly unremarkable man who sees the eternal in the temporal, and who has the breadth and depth of language to communicate his insight to us.

This book is a counterweight to the frenetic age in which we live currently. The book illustrates what it means to live simply and authentically, instead of measuring ourselves against others and allowing external forces to control us.

Wendell Berry depicts the decline of rural America before the forces of greed. 

His narrator, a small-town barber named Jayber Crow, sees his friends and neighbors trying to hold on to meaning and dignity in the face of their impending economic obsolescence. Every character is vividly human; every situation is particular and yet universal.

I love this book on its own terms, and I treasure it as a sympathetic perspective on the themes in my poetry.