The Kentucky farmer poet writes with feeling and beauty about farming and the relationship between man and the land. Man as a vertical extension of the earth who will return as compost to enrich it. Man, the sower and manager of the things that grow, but limited by our temporal mortality though we “set foot into time to come.” A strong sense of lineage and the gift given by those before us that we pass on to those coming. A poem reminded me of Matt Harrington:

A Praise

His memories lived in the place

Like fingers locked in the rock ledges

Like roots.  When he died

And his influence entered the air

I said, let my mind be the earth

Of his thought, let his kindness

Go ahead of me. Though I do not escape

The history barbed in my flash,

Certain wise movements of his hands,

The turns of his speech

Keep with me. His hope of peace

Keeps with me in harsh days,

The shell of his breath dimming away

Three summers in the earth.