Oliver combines essays about nature with essays about (primarily) American authors who wrote about nature in this thoughtful and interesting collection. It took me a little bit to ease into it--I think there's a specific way of approaching nature writing that I'm resistant to that this book engages in, and it took a little getting used to. (It's a kind of nature writing that sees the return to nature as absolutely necessary without examination about the kinds of limitations and different relationships people of different identities have to nature.) But I think there are definitely things to take away and by the end I was caught along enough to be able to appreciate it. I don't know that this was the best place to start with Mary Oliver's work--I'm looking forward to trying her poems, rather than these essays--but the essays were often beautiful and interesting to read.