Farming Dreams

In this book of translated Danish poetry, farming is not used as a background for personal drama but as the speaker's central subject. The poet succeeds in defining his central task as the vivid evocation of the repeated seasonal chores that make up the essence of farming life. Never sentimental, and often humorous, the book might be called an earthy celebration of essential ritual; but it is an elegy as well, for the poems also chronicle the pressures that lead to collapse of farming as a ...