‘Graceland, At Last’ unfolds a Southerner’s wise and hopeful essays

Since 2017, from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, Margaret Renkl has written a column for The New York Times that covers, as the paper puts it, “flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.” She made a splash in 2019 with “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss,” a fragmentary memoir that repurposed some of the material from her column. It was a good book that invited Renkl’s fans to wonder when a more conventional