[close] The country of language, in nature essayist and science-fiction writer Scott Russell Sanders's happy phrase, is the land that humans enter when, early in life, they learn to put words to things. Sanders writes with fine, measured humor of his passage into that terra incognita through episodes involving snakebite, guns, insects, and the other facts of life of his childhood along the Mississippi Delta and, later, in the woods of Ohio. Those episodes, he allows, may not have taken place just as he recalls them; after all, he was just a child, and "memory is a trickster, shifting shapes, playing jokes, reworking the past." True or not, they showcase Sanders's considerable abilities as an interpreter of the natural world and as a storyteller, abilities that have given birth to such fine books as Stone Country and Staying Put.

In other pieces in this brief volume in Milkweed Editions' Credo series, Sanders discusses the work of nature writing, a genre of literature that, as he puts it, speaks "for light and earth and water and air, for companions, for beauty, meaning, grace." Series editor Scott Slovic adds an essay on Sanders's vision and a bibliography of his publications, making this a useful resource for students and admirers of the writer's work. --Gregory McNamee [close]