Discuss "Upstream" by Mary Oliver via Zoom. Click the link above or join at https://zoom.us/j/157999301 or with Meeting ID 157 999 301

Physical copies are available first-come first-serve at the Downtown Bend Customer Service Desk. Or you can place digital and physical copies on-hold here: https://dpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/1653332094

While most of the essays in this collection have been published previously, they span the last 20 years of this National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's life so that the experience of reading them together is almost like reading a memoir. Rather than a seamless narrative about the major events that have shaped Oliver's life, the book is an extended meditation on the significant discoveries that formed her mind: the quiet woods near her childhood home in rural Ohio, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, cool solitude. In each essay, Oliver reflects on these influences and reveals how they have made her the keen observer and artist that she is today. Her focus on nature and the concept of seeing calls to mind Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Certainly, Oliver's collection will appeal to Dillard fans and to anyone who enjoys nature writing, but readers who have found Dillard too effusive will find Oliver much more precise and, therefore, much more accessible.