Scott Russell Sanders reveals how the pressure of the sacred breaks through the surfaces of ordinary life-a life devoted to grown-up children and aging parents, the craft of writing, and the natural world. Whether writing to his daughter and his son as each prepares to get married, or describing an encounter with a red-tailed hawk in whose form he glimpses his dead father, or praising the disciplines of writing and carpentry and teaching, Sanders registers, in finely tuned prose, the force of spirit.

"Secrets of the Universe" ranges from an autobiographical tour-de-force that describes a childhood spent with an alcoholic father to 'Looking at Women, ' a reflection on male yearning and confusion, to a look at the place-or absence-of nature in recent American fiction