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Of this book Wendell Berry wrote, "Judevine is full of loving interest in other people and in what I still insist on calling the real world. Budbill both informs and moves and he is, in short, a delight and a comfort."

These dark, lyrical, funny narrative poems portray the hopes and joys, pains and despair of people who have been bypassed or bruised by the twentieth century. Budbill has written a song of the down-and-out or overlooked, a song of the unsung. This anthem of the rural renaissance is microcosmic in setting, but universal in scope.

Several years ago while hiking in the wooded hills behind his house, David Budbill came upon a cabin on the eastern side of Judevine Mountain. On subsequent visits Budbill found a hermit there: a poet in the ancient Chinese style. As with his progenitor, the T'ang dynasty poet Cold Mountain (Han Shan), this poet named himself for the place where he lives - Judevine Mountain. In these poems Judevine Mountain is a man of contradictions: of solitude and loneliness, contentment and restlessness, generosity and envy. For Judevine Mountain - this most settled of poets - nothing is ever settled, solved or understood.