Robert Root

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Robert's Blogs

Scholar’s Sensibility, Poet’s Eye
Since 1926 the John Burroughs Association has awarded its medal to nature writers, many of whom I’ve heard of (Carson, Eiseley, Zwinger, Leopold, Lopez, and McPhee for starters) and many others I haven’t but might want to look up. Having read both Sightlines and Surfacing, her 2019 collection of essays, I readily include Jamie among those we most need to be reading.
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Meditative Naturalist, Intimate Essayist, Visionary Author
I began reading the essays of Scott Russell Sanders when I encountered “The Inheritance of Tools” in The Best American Essays 1987. I’ve collected his books of essays ever since and, as a life-long resident of Great Lakes states, have felt a strong sense of identification with works like Secrets of the Universe, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, Writing From the Center, and Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journeys.
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Celebration and Lamentation in Place and Time
Robert Miltner is best known as a prose poet and most of the pieces here reflect in their brevity the concentrated lyricism of his poetry even as their perspectives are expanded and enhanced. If Robert Miltner gives us intimate reflections on interrelations in place, Barbara Hurd offers a most expansive perspective on existence. In The Epilogues: Afterwords on the Planet, her reflections are separated by brief comments about the extinctions the planet has witnessed since its creation, including the sixth extinction that we’re living through now.
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The Fire That Burns the Hurt Away
The memoir thread is anchored in Macdonald’s response to the unexpected death of her father on a London street. Father and daughter were close; his loss capsizes her sense of herself in the world and haunts her throughout the book.
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