Reviewed by the late Jim Wayne Miller, author and Western Kentucky University professor.

For 26 years, David Dick reported news from all over the United States and the world. Now, from Plum Lick in Bourbon County, Kentucky, he reports the poetry of country living, news that stays news.

Since 1989, Dick's monthly column, The View From Plum Lick, has appeared in "Kentucky Living," the magazine with the largest circulation in the state. In Kentucky's bicentennial year. Dick has appropriately gathered many of those columns - together with others - into this volume, making them available to even wider audience.

Dick has given Kentucky yet another bicentennial gift. The View From Plum Lick belongs on the shelf (or on the bedside table) with The Kentucky Encyclopedia, Lowell Harrison's Kentucky's Road to Statehood, Dr. Thomas Clark's recently reissued The Kentucky, and Beverly Brannan and David Horvath's A Kentucky Album. As Clark writes in his foreward, Dick writes with the "grace and spiritual attachment" of other Kentucky writers such as Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Wendell Berry, James Still II and Jesse Stuart.

In a preface, Dick describes his spiritual attachment to Kentucky. Throughout his years in broadcast journalism - as a reporter for WHAS Radio and Television in Louisville and for 19 years as a correspondent for CBS News, covering assignments in 22 countries and all the states except Alaska and Hawaii - he carried "the green and the dream" of returning to Plum Lick in Bourbon County, to land purchased 200 years ago by his ancestor, Joshua.

Alluding to the famous compass image in John Donne's poem, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," Dick describes this ancestral land, in the family for eight generations, as the "fixt foot" that anchored him as he journeyed throughout the country and the world.

These essays, more than 70 in all, tell the story of how Dick realized the dream of returning to Plum Lick, where he now lives with his wife, Lalie, and daughter, Ravy, while also serving as director of the University of Kentucky School of Journalism. (He resigned this position in 1993).

By turns graceful, witty and reflective, Dick's essays, few more than two or three pages in length, transform "the green and the dream" into the stable, steadfast life of Plum Lick's people, plants, and animals.

He writes about relatives and neighbors, tobacco sticks and lightning bugs, sheep, sheep dogs, and sheepshearers, sacred cows and coyotes, geese and sycamores, the universality of the soil. He can make a delightful essay out of his musings about a cricket in the bathtub, or a button found by the side of the road.

Dick writes of simple things and of values expressed with the simplicity and clarity of a poet. He describes a poor crop of peppers as "spindly, gnarled and tasteless to boot - about like some of the stories we were putting into the newspaper.""

Of Quinn, a New Zealander who had studied both sheepshearing and journalism, he observes: "There may be a connection between the two professions. Richard Nixon probably felt sheared by Woodward and Bernstein. Spiro Agnew possibly noticed the nicks of the nattering nabobs of negativism."

In no way blinkered, The View From Plum Lick connects the local and far away - a dry season in Kentucky with water shortages in California, famine in Africa. From the "fixt foot" of Plum Lick, Dick writes about "The Joys of Homegrown Ham," about cornbread, pinto beans, cole slaw, and iced tea - but also about interviewing Gen. Somoza in Paraguay; about "close calls, when I thought for sure I was about to buy the farm: Jonestown; Beirut; Nicaragua; El Salvador, the Laurel, Maryland Shopping Center."