Review: Elemental Surprises, essays by Walt McLaughlin, Great Elm Press, ISBN 0-945251-11-4, 1205 Co. Rte. 60 Rexvillle, NY 14877, $5.00 ppd.

Elemental, but not elementary. Surprises, only if you, given the state of the art, do not expect good writing. Walt McLaughlin’s Elemental Surprises is simple in the way Charles Olson exhorted us by the negative example in the confession that he learned “the simple things last.” Elemental Surprises is a collection of six essays that record McLaughlin’s meditations inspired by his constant contact with the natural world, so when he speaks philosophy it comes from the source, the only reliable source, the awareness that nature contains us and is us, man not apart but a part. So simple, and yet the consequences of not being aware of this elemental realization are too obvious to mention, and to his credit McLaughlin wastes little time on the vulgar and on planet threatening folly.

If I were to realize a dream of mine to collect a volume of nature writing to use as a teaching text for college students, along with Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Thoreau, Muir, Burroughs, Richard Nelson, and the master stylist Edwin Way Teale, I would include McLaughlin’s final essay in this collection: “The Wilderness Within.” It is simple writing, easily understood, but as solid as Snyder’s essay on wild writing “Language Goes Two Ways” (Sulfur 36) and Lopez’ similar piece in Crossing Open Ground, “Landscape and Narrative.” Nature writers, and Thoreau the best example of it, know that as a writer the essential struggle is to understand the wildness of writing and then maintain it, sustain it, keep it within the act of writing, as that is ultimately what sustains us all.

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