In THE RURAL LIFE, the hugely admired author of "The Last Fine Time" preserves and makes new the sights, smells, sounds, and poetry of country living. Here, Verlyn Klinkenborg reveals the beauty of the American landscape, not from a scenic overlook, but through a screened-in porch or from the window of a pickup driving down an empty highway in the teeth of an approaching storm. Klinkenborg brings reports of rural life back to us, his readers, with writing as vivid as high noon on a summer day or as dreamy as a dusk lit by fireflies. Composed in sections corresponding to the months of the year, The Rural Life highlights the pleasures and hardships, the reveries and stillness, that each season offers to the willing observer. Whether he writes of a small farm in upstate New York, a high pasture deep within the Rocky Mountains, or the bricked edge of a city shuddering in the wake of a "sudden Tuesday," Klinkenborg bears witness to nature"s play in language as simple, unsentimental, and direct as life itself.