Hunter shows his command of a speech-based free verse learned from William Carlos Williams, using its accents in gritty accounts of determination and endurance, as shown by rural people and the animals they tend. A superb pagelong one-sentence poem (''Because for Once There Was Too Much'') puts a bountiful harvest in stoical perspective. Longer poems explain how to dig a well, spread manure or bring hogs to market, stressing the virtues such work promotes: a mismatched team of geldings, for example, labors ''as one / to back out of a tight spot.''