People have compared my poetry to Mary Oliver's enough times that I felt I should learn more about her. After reading this book, I'm honored by the comparison. She writes very simple, clean poetry about the natural world, and I can only hope that one day I achieve some measure of the control that she exhibits here. 
 One oddity about this book: I'd expected the poems to be arranged in chronological order, and it took me some time to realize they were actually arranged in reverse chronological order, with the newest poems first. I suspect this was done for the benefit of her fans who wanted to get to the new stuff first, but it was somewhat confusing for me, as I was reading the book expecting to see the unfolding of her style over time. Once I figured out what was going on, I started reading the book from the back (the way I almost always read magazines), and it made a lot more sense to me.