Judith Moffett wanted to be a full-time subsistence farmer: a homesteader. She settled instead for just one year of living close to the land, temporarily forsaking her academic and writing careers to devote herself, with her husband's help, to a one-acre plot in a suburb outside Philadelphia. And from the year's hard work of potato planting, duck and fish farming, honey extraction, blueberry picking, and spaghetti sauce production, grew an awareness that more was involved here than putting food on the table; her project was a living lesson in the complex ways in which everything in nature is interconnected.

Pennterra is a beautiful and fertile planet and humanitys last hope for survival. But Pennterra is already inhabited. After warning other colony ships to stay away, the small advance colony of Quakers has adapted to life on Pennterra. Heeding the empathic warnings of the native hrossa, they have settled in a single valley, sharply limited their population, and continued to use no heavy machinery in their building and farming. But surviving under these conditions has left the Quakers little time to learn more about their native neighbors. Catastrophe or peaceTanka Wakan, the omnipotent master spirit of Pennterra, will decide. "Stunning . . . the best first novel I have read in at least a decade . . . dangerous and breathtaking to behold . . . " Michael Bishop

Analyzes the themes and techniques used in Merrill's most important poems, and suggests the influences which shaped his work.