SOURCE: Miller, David. “Out Far and In Deep.” Sewanee Review 96, no. 4 (fall 1988): 684-87.

In the following excerpt, Miller offers a positive assessment of In Deep: Country Essays.

Nature writing is essential, if only to remind us that there may still exist what Thoreau, perched on Mt. Ktaadn in Maine, called “the unhandselled globe”—a wonderful phrase Maxine Kumin borrows for a chapter title. The better sort of nature book occasionally diverts us from rustic delight and ecological exhortation deep into the unhandselled darkness for a lesson in otherness. Ktaadn, Thoreau wrote, was beautiful, but also “savage and awful,” a creation of “Chaos and Old Night” as alien as “some star's surface” yet of the same material as our bodies. In terror he exclaimed: “Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in Nature—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it. … Who are we? Where are...