With grace, style, and gentle, self-deprecating wit, John Jerome describes the back-breaking but soul-mending task of building a stone wall on his New England farm. The job begins on a whim—he decides to move one from his woods for the sheer pleasure of seeing it from the house—and as the wall progresses, the physical occupation leads Jerome to philosophical preoccupation. Thus Stone Work, first published in 1989, becomes a discourse on the meaning of craft, the stolidness of work, the gifts of the seasons, and the complexities of being male and fifty-five.

Jerome finds something pure in the lugging and the struggling with the stones, a clarity that leads him to insights into family ties, the tenuousness of nature's beauty, and his ongoing quest for fixity in a world of flux. "Maybe gravity is all the alignment one ever gets," he thinks as he pushes a stone into place, "and therefore all I ought to need. What more could one want, anyway, than the sure sense—right there, at any given moment for the noticing—of a straight line pointing toward the center of the earth?" While his wall isn't a masterwork—isn't even finished—his hands-on labor allows Jerome to grasp some elemental truths; with him we come to see the "riches, riches, everywhere, just for the paying of attention."