I picked up this read from Oliver, one I hadn't yet thumbed through, while in Provincetown. So on the nose, yes. But the lad working at the East End Books store told me at checkout that the closing page about P-town is one thing that made him want to live there, or made him fall in love with living there. Suffice to say, when one gets to that page, all of 170ish in, it's well worth the wait. It made me still.

"Provincetown has what we called Mediterranean light ... [but a] town cannot live on dreams."

There's always an earnest, realistic ease to Oliver's writing, whether poem or prose. I so enjoy that she was such a realist. She had seen it all and lived most everything. Animals die. They kill each other and eat each other. Humans do much of the same. At the end of the day, we're not so elevated from the beasts. We should know that much; we should know better.

Some of the most enjoyable morsels here from Oliver, who died in early 2019 at age 83, come in her salutes and sendups to other writers, timeless ones: Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, Wordsworth and Whitman. A bunch of men, yes, some more complicated than others. I found her musings on Emerson and Poe to be particularly compelling, and learned some things about Thoreau that gave me a greater appreciation.