A review by reebsforspace
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

3.5

If you love the natural world and literature and if finding yourself amongst comfort, in a library, a bookstore, a cafe in which you come across this book, I implore you to read the first section, that is all you need. Oliver captures the creative, the individual, the world, with carnal, breathy thoughts. It is not a 'squishy,' heart eyed love affair, it is a viewing of the human mind. And thus the desire for art, the calling of the forest floor, the necessity and the crazed, lurching towards complete unity with mother earth.  Eventually, this leads to demolition, dissonance harbored in the human mind, of course Oliver does not recognize in the heat of it. Do you blame her? I do, just a little. The beginning of Upstream is absolutely gorgeous, and the rest, perhaps some may figure, predictably, fizzles out.
 
I believe Oliver was genuine in her desire to take her reader with her, upstream, but somewhere, in a marked place, let them go, and towering over such things, sharing with her, where is there to go but down when she does so?