Lyrical, witty, and elegiac, the twenty-five essays in NEARER show the imagination at work and play amid the ambiguities, consternations, and beauties of the world. They range in subject matter from confrontations with magnitude (God, death, and the physical universe) to examinations of the compact, coiled insistences to be found in the ordinary and the local-what John Updike refers to as "the small answer of a texture." There are meditations on the appeals and the pitfalls of celebrity, the strange and complex nature of memorials, the threat of creeping fraudulence in personal and...