A review by merrrry
Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

reflective relaxing

3.0

Hmmmm I went into this expecting to really like it having enjoyed “A Thousand Mornings”. Mary Oliver’s prose and atmosphere works better in poetry form in my opinion. For some reason, I couldn’t connect with the way she wrote about nature here. There were definitely a lot of amazing quotable bits, but I personally didn’t find them in the parts about nature. It is possible that I just wasn’t in the right mindset for this collection — I read most of it while extremely tired and frequently felt the urge to rush through since I wasn’t really intrigued by the content. Most of the pieces about her love for writing and writers went over my head as I’m not the biggest classic literature buff, but the ones I did get were great (such as the Poe piece). As a whole, not a bad collection, but not for me.