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Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
An evocative anthology of nine imaginative essays explores swampland ecology and the allure of muddy environments, with reflections on ancient mythology, Eastern spirituality, and literature to celebrate these rich and fertile habitats, too often ignored and disparaged by humankind. Reprint.
144 pages, Paperback
First published February 26, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
December 31, 2020
I am a big fan of films set in the wilderness - like Sorcerer, Apocalypse Now and Deliverance. There is an allure to hidden lakes, thick unassailable forests and prairies. On the one hand, I think the attraction towards such places represents a longing for childhood. But they also represent a dark side of my psyche. I have often fantasized about my life as a man on the run from the law and how the swamps and forests would provide refuge from the world. I have also felt that I should read about the flora and fauna of swamps and bogs. I kept putting it away because I am not a big reader of non-fiction. I was hoping that some crime fiction writer had written a novel set in the swamps and I would stumble upon it. I saw this book by Barbara Hurd on a Goodreads list and ordered it one night when I was drunk. I did not realize I had ordered it and was startled, a month later, when I received the message from Amazon that the book was out for delivery.
The book was a pleasant surprise. It was everything that I had wanted in a book about swamps and more. It is not a book that simply describes the flora and fauna of swamps. That is there, but it also connects swamps to human experience, imagination and religion. Not just that. Barbara Hurd is a fantastic writer. This is a woman who really loves swamps and she has thought deeply about her experiences in them (Finzel Swamp and Cransville Swamp). She is a total romantic and though she does get carried away with her love for swamps at times, her writing is revelatory and profound:
“To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”
She informs us about a number of interesting characters in swamps:
Skunk Cabbage: it is a plant that can melt snow because it can maintain an internal temperature that is 20 degrees higher than the surroundings.
Spring peepers: There is an army of these frogs in swamps and they create a hell of a lot of noise during mating season.
350 year old crocodiles
The bog turtle - reptiles that have survived for centuries and changed the least. Hurd attributes their survival to being able to switch between both the wet and dry lands.
Pitcher plants - a flesh eating plant with sticky secretions in its leaves. Insects that get stuck in the leaves have no means of escape.
Bladderworts- another flesh eating plant with underwater bladders that can trap water fleas and mosquito larva.
Larch trees - a coniferous tree that drop their needles every fall. Hurd is enamored by the beauty of these trees and their fallen needles.
Sea cucumbers - they eject their innards when an enemy tries to catch them and then drift away to hide somewhere and regenerate themselves.
Like I said earlier, there is more to this book than mere descriptions of flora and fauna. Hurd relates her personal experiences as a child and adult to the swamps and bogs. She talks about how swamps are often associated with the criminal and the dangerous. How it provides shelter to refugees and the persecuted. She provides examples from American history to bolster her argument.
Many religions and cultures associated swamps and bogs with decay and sickness. But they also buried their dead in the swamps. What they did not know was that the acidic water in swamps prevented the growth of microorganisms that helped the decomposition of the human body. So the buried bodies would never decompose. She gives the example of the corpse of Tollund Man, discovered in a Denmark bog, with his face and whiskers intact.
I have only mentioned the parts that interested me the most, in this review. There is a lot more in this small book filled with dense prose written with a lot of love, hard work and imagination. I read it while on holiday, getting sun burnt in a pool. I recommend it.
The book was a pleasant surprise. It was everything that I had wanted in a book about swamps and more. It is not a book that simply describes the flora and fauna of swamps. That is there, but it also connects swamps to human experience, imagination and religion. Not just that. Barbara Hurd is a fantastic writer. This is a woman who really loves swamps and she has thought deeply about her experiences in them (Finzel Swamp and Cransville Swamp). She is a total romantic and though she does get carried away with her love for swamps at times, her writing is revelatory and profound:
“To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”
She informs us about a number of interesting characters in swamps:
Skunk Cabbage: it is a plant that can melt snow because it can maintain an internal temperature that is 20 degrees higher than the surroundings.
Spring peepers: There is an army of these frogs in swamps and they create a hell of a lot of noise during mating season.
350 year old crocodiles
The bog turtle - reptiles that have survived for centuries and changed the least. Hurd attributes their survival to being able to switch between both the wet and dry lands.
Pitcher plants - a flesh eating plant with sticky secretions in its leaves. Insects that get stuck in the leaves have no means of escape.
Bladderworts- another flesh eating plant with underwater bladders that can trap water fleas and mosquito larva.
Larch trees - a coniferous tree that drop their needles every fall. Hurd is enamored by the beauty of these trees and their fallen needles.
Sea cucumbers - they eject their innards when an enemy tries to catch them and then drift away to hide somewhere and regenerate themselves.
Like I said earlier, there is more to this book than mere descriptions of flora and fauna. Hurd relates her personal experiences as a child and adult to the swamps and bogs. She talks about how swamps are often associated with the criminal and the dangerous. How it provides shelter to refugees and the persecuted. She provides examples from American history to bolster her argument.
Many religions and cultures associated swamps and bogs with decay and sickness. But they also buried their dead in the swamps. What they did not know was that the acidic water in swamps prevented the growth of microorganisms that helped the decomposition of the human body. So the buried bodies would never decompose. She gives the example of the corpse of Tollund Man, discovered in a Denmark bog, with his face and whiskers intact.
I have only mentioned the parts that interested me the most, in this review. There is a lot more in this small book filled with dense prose written with a lot of love, hard work and imagination. I read it while on holiday, getting sun burnt in a pool. I recommend it.
September 30, 2019
I want to remember in my body the fringes of the Cambrian Ocean where the first green cell leapt from the sea, flopped into swamps, lured by air and the warmth of the sun while still clinging to the silent mud of its origins.
The region of the earth that I currently call home is a swampy marshland - and many of the places that Hurd describes in this book are close to my home. I have a deep appreciation for swamps and bogs and the important ecosystem of this marginal landscape; but Hurd takes this appreciation to a whole new level. While I've admired the amazing carnivorous plants, the cypress, the mosses, on my walks through various swamps and bogs, I've never had the urge to walk into the water and muck and submerse myself like Hurd describes, but I can admire her passion to do so!
The book has some lovely passages that begin with descriptions of this landscape, and then morph into meditations on life, relationships, and spirituality. It is a special kind of writer that can do this so seamlessly. I look forward to reading more books by her.
April 26, 2012
The universe dropped this book into my lap the day after we visited and I became enchanted with Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. We were shopping at a flea market and I happened to find an old National Geographic magazine from 2007 I had been looking for. The vendor told me I could pick out two more magazines or books for the 25 cents I was paying him for it. The first book my eyes saw as I glanced over the pile was Stirring the Mud and I thought, how wonderful, a book about swamps!
This book is amazing, exploring with such lyrical prose the physical and spiritual beauty and mystery of swamps. I had a powerful feeling of transcendence in Okefenokee, with no words to convey the experience I was having there. Barbara Hurd seems to know how to express thoughts and feelings about swamps that resonated with me deeply.
This book is amazing, exploring with such lyrical prose the physical and spiritual beauty and mystery of swamps. I had a powerful feeling of transcendence in Okefenokee, with no words to convey the experience I was having there. Barbara Hurd seems to know how to express thoughts and feelings about swamps that resonated with me deeply.
February 19, 2011
If I had to choose one book to keep among those I read in 2010, this would be it. In Chapter One, 'Marginalia', she explores edges: "Whether bog or swamp, all wetlands have edges, rich strips where two hands clasp. On the edge, vegetation is always more varied, a mix of mature trees and grassland, or bog mat and shrubs, waterlilies and spruce saplings. Browsing creatures and wind-carried seed cross over from one biotic community to another. The young are often raised along these edge zones where, for example, the forest on one side offers shelter and the open fields on the other offer food. These margins are places of transition and diversity and abundance, one of the most highly trafficked places in the natural world." Humans, on the other hand, don't tend to be edge-species, feeling in some ways vulnerable in such transitional terrain, apparently preferring in or out, yes or no. I'm ok with the in-between, and find creativity there in the muck, and a certain delight in the questions that arise in a dynamic openness to change.
Barbara Hurd is writing in the very best tradition of nature-philosophers-- a keen observer of the world around and within, and that place where we humans are at one with nature in her many moods. Sublime!
Barbara Hurd is writing in the very best tradition of nature-philosophers-- a keen observer of the world around and within, and that place where we humans are at one with nature in her many moods. Sublime!
May 9, 2011
where did this little gem come from.....meandering mud and mind and the mysterious edges of our lives that we traverse so carefully.
the swamp that beckons to a chosen few who are willing to stir the mud and see what happens. thank you jo.
the swamp that beckons to a chosen few who are willing to stir the mud and see what happens. thank you jo.
March 25, 2022
I first fell in love with creative non-fiction in college during a creative class. Since then I have sought out essays like this one during times of great transition, reflection, and alteration. This book held me close and prompted a lot of journaling as I begin to think about my Master's Thesis as well as a dear friend's upcoming ordination. There's a lot of theological meat here, as well. I found her reflections on the natural to have qualities of the original Christian mystics. Her Celtic roots also gave her theology a bit of witchiness-- which I have grown fond of recently.
"Everything I feel about comfort starts to rattle. He tells me, quietly, "I want to live like an animal, close to the earth, self-sufficient, doing as little harm as possible." And ten minutes later: "And I want to live like Christ, close to God, detached, open to the unknown."(46) "
"Everything I feel about comfort starts to rattle. He tells me, quietly, "I want to live like an animal, close to the earth, self-sufficient, doing as little harm as possible." And ten minutes later: "And I want to live like Christ, close to God, detached, open to the unknown."(46) "
February 29, 2024
This meandering, musing, magical book defies definition. Apologies for the alliteration. Just straight-up non-stop gorgeous writing, pure depth, beauty and originality of thought. I will definitely be reading more by this author.
"To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”
"To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”
October 19, 2023
I was immediately drawn in by the author's skilled wordsmithing. She created the most beautiful sentences and paragraphs, but then jumped into different muses midway through scenes. That made this book far more difficult to read than it would have had to be.
February 6, 2017
This was one of those books that was hard to rate, because although I didn't like it, I have to concede that it was well-written and it would probably be enjoyed by a different reader. I've been reading a lot of "nature writing" lately, and I can definitely say that I have a preference for a more down-to-earth, factual approach, with some narrative and humor sprinkled in. It seems that I do not like intellectual, philosophical, poetic musings about nature, such as this book.
I happen to love swamps, bogs and the human imagination, but I didn't learn anything about swamps or bogs in this book (it is a collection of creative essays), nor did I feel inspired to run out and visit one, and although I feel more acquainted with the author's imagination, I thought her essays seemed rather contrived and...odd. I guess that's it in a nutshell: her thought processes seemed kind of odd to me. The essays were a series of extended metaphors about human nature, based upon the author's experiences, using bogs and swamps as a starting point, but I didn't really feel that bogs and swamps were the true topic, just the start off point for her musings.
Maybe it's just better to judge for yourself. Here are a couple of examples of what I found bizarre.
The author sees a mink and thinks:
"Covered with dark fur, its chin dabbed with white, it reminded me of what theologians say about the life of the personality being horizontal, craving community; and that of the soul, vertical, needing solitude. This mink, going from what alder to another, manages both landscapes, traces with its lustrous back a pattern of swell and subsides, evokes an image of Muslims prostrating themselves and standing, Catholics kneeling and rising, pale inchworms arching and stretching along my forearm."
Personally, when I see a mink, I think, "Hey, cool! A mink!!" And...that's about it. So maybe that's why I found that passage bizarre, pretentious and actually, it has nothing to do with actual minks at all.
One more example. The author's legs sink into the mud and she thinks:
"No wonder the Puritans hated swamps. Think of it this way: in sex, the more a man disappears inside a woman, the more she feels his presence. But if you're prudish about such things and used to banishing what you don't like, you can't stand a damp and slippery world where the banished keeps growing, where what's buried is so deeply felt."
Okay then! Once again, she's not really writing about swamps at all in that passage. Also, I'm pretty sure that the Puritans and other early settlers, as with people today, disliked and drained wetlands so they could farm them and slap houses all over them, and they objected to the bugs, not because they're too sexy! Overall, I was really disappointed; based on the topic, I was really expecting to love this book, as I can see by the other reviews that many other readers do.
I happen to love swamps, bogs and the human imagination, but I didn't learn anything about swamps or bogs in this book (it is a collection of creative essays), nor did I feel inspired to run out and visit one, and although I feel more acquainted with the author's imagination, I thought her essays seemed rather contrived and...odd. I guess that's it in a nutshell: her thought processes seemed kind of odd to me. The essays were a series of extended metaphors about human nature, based upon the author's experiences, using bogs and swamps as a starting point, but I didn't really feel that bogs and swamps were the true topic, just the start off point for her musings.
Maybe it's just better to judge for yourself. Here are a couple of examples of what I found bizarre.
The author sees a mink and thinks:
"Covered with dark fur, its chin dabbed with white, it reminded me of what theologians say about the life of the personality being horizontal, craving community; and that of the soul, vertical, needing solitude. This mink, going from what alder to another, manages both landscapes, traces with its lustrous back a pattern of swell and subsides, evokes an image of Muslims prostrating themselves and standing, Catholics kneeling and rising, pale inchworms arching and stretching along my forearm."
Personally, when I see a mink, I think, "Hey, cool! A mink!!" And...that's about it. So maybe that's why I found that passage bizarre, pretentious and actually, it has nothing to do with actual minks at all.
One more example. The author's legs sink into the mud and she thinks:
"No wonder the Puritans hated swamps. Think of it this way: in sex, the more a man disappears inside a woman, the more she feels his presence. But if you're prudish about such things and used to banishing what you don't like, you can't stand a damp and slippery world where the banished keeps growing, where what's buried is so deeply felt."
Okay then! Once again, she's not really writing about swamps at all in that passage. Also, I'm pretty sure that the Puritans and other early settlers, as with people today, disliked and drained wetlands so they could farm them and slap houses all over them, and they objected to the bugs, not because they're too sexy! Overall, I was really disappointed; based on the topic, I was really expecting to love this book, as I can see by the other reviews that many other readers do.
September 21, 2011
This is a fabulous book! At a time when I was drawn down in terms of inspiration, this book kept offering me new ideas and new views and subtle commentary about the need to feed one's creativity outside, it was if I'd been invited to sit by a fire flaring with other writer's dreams and slowly grew more and more eager to add my own to the fire.
I'm keeping this on a shelf for days when the news is bad, the irritation overwhelming, the chatter in my head too loud, or whatever circumstance is battering itself against my shutters.
I'm keeping this on a shelf for days when the news is bad, the irritation overwhelming, the chatter in my head too loud, or whatever circumstance is battering itself against my shutters.
August 18, 2020
No stories, per se, just lyric meanderings on the subject of mud and mud-related conditions. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "beauty arrests movement." Hurd reminds us that Galway Kinnell's poem, "The Bear" is an extended metaphor, an ars poetic. A surprising collection of lyric essays. If you aim to write in that particular sub-genre, this is definitely the anthology to study.
June 8, 2009
This author has the most luscious writing. It is very meditative, can be picked up at any place and read over and over again. I wish she wrote more than the occasional book or article.
August 31, 2022
This is the second book of nature writing I've enjoyed by this author. It's the sort, for me, that takes a little work—to slow down, calm down, breathe more deeply—before I am able to sink in to this slow, meandering, lyrical, musing style, but I'm always so glad I did. It's a baseline state that frees me for my own sensory immersion and contemplative wonderings beyond the rigid facts and authoritative prescriptions of science or environmental writing. "It was more than the sight of the bear I was after. Something else: to walk with this longing that presses like whittled bone against my ribs, a vision that pulses just under my skin, pirouettes on the pointed tips of emerging skunk cabbage, sinks back into muck." Like the swamps and bogs she explores, this diffuse, fluid collection won't be for everyone, but it was most definitely for me.
December 25, 2022
This book was absolutely fantastic. Hurd has an amazing way with words, so evocative and breathtaking. In her writing you can feel the mud between your toes and smell the bog. I picked up this book because I'm writing a story set in a swamp and this book was amazing help with that; I learned about what plants and animals that are to be found in swamps. I love how Hurd takes a very underappreciated type of habitat/landscape and romanticized it. I love her sense of adventure and connection to the land.
February 14, 2024
This book was helpful for a personal project in thinking about bogs and imagination for some of my research. I wouldn't say it was a scientific book, but it was helpful information on how people have thought about bogs and these "thinner places" over time. The writing style is pretty flowery which I know isn't for everyone, but I really enjoyed the way the author things and writes about these subjects and her insights around them. I'd love to grab a cup of coffee with her someday. I enjoyed it.
June 30, 2021
This book is gooey and soupy and dreamy. The author dons hip waders to squish out metaphor and opaque imagery. It's scientifically informed poetry. It's about liminality, emptiness, spirituality, unknown, death, decay, preservation and human relationships with wildness. It showcases Tamarack, Ghost Pipes, Pitcher Plants, Lady Slippers, Duck Weed, swamp gas, Bog Beacons and mud. This book was written for me.
March 1, 2020
Essays on nature and life, but they aren’t very scientific (that could be a benefit for some). Very nice. Not “wow” nice, but well written. It’s hard to write a whole book about swamps and not get repetitive if you are not deep into the science of them.
February 19, 2021
What gives a swamp value? This book does not answer that question, but makes you think about what makes you ask that question, questioning the feelings and impulses that happen when we encounter swamps. Thought provoking and interesting.
June 11, 2019
An irritatingly large amount of Buddhist musings that, for me, took away from the power of the book.
August 27, 2019
One of the most beautiful & imagination provoking books I’ve read in quite a while. Bogs & swamps as poetic muse for meditations on life & death, creation & rotting.
September 13, 2019
A perfect read for all your swamp-loving poets. Or poet wannabes. Or swamp-loving wannabes. I liked it a lot. Full disclosure -you might say I'm a swamp geek.
April 5, 2021
Her prose is like poetry. Gorgeous book, each chapter about a different aspect of wild places.
May 25, 2021
Beautiful lyrical essays about the not so beautiful but spellbindingly alluring swampland!
November 26, 2021
I devoured this book. Loved every second of it. Will definitely read again!
May 15, 2022
Beautifully written and inspiring for all writers
September 17, 2014
(Homework response October 3, 2011)
Others have already commented on the poetic nature of Barbara Hurd's language in her essay “Moonmilk” and in this book Stirring the Mud, but I thought that the similarities extend further than just the use of metaphor and the description of landscape. The way that she weaves together art, mythology and spirituality with her imagery of the swamp and her own personal history is perhaps the quality of the essays that make them the most like modern poetry. Poetry is largely about a tying together of two unlike things, often an image with an idea or emotion that one wouldn't normally associate with that image. Hurd does that extensively in her essays. In the first essay in “Stirring the Mud,” she uses the image of the blurry edges of the sway to talk about the human discomfort with the uncategorizable, giving first person examples like her own encouraging poetry students to leave their comfort zone. Likewise, in “Moonmilk” she uses the idea of this rock transformed in to a soft material to explore the changes that occur in human nature as our lives change.
Along with the poetry-like connections at work Hurd's writing has rhythms that sound incredibly lyrical. Although I only had the opportunity to read one of her essays out loud, I was amazed by the rhythms and alliteration that I may not have noticed had I been reading silently. With her skill in rhythm, she is able to capture action and mood while never losing the vividness of the landscape in passages such as “I'm obliterating them in a flurry of repetition, a chat of exorcism I do with my body. Jab, squeeze, open, again and again. The slashed canes collapse against each other. I straighten my arms, lock my elbows, and sever and whack, my hands on long handles pulling out, pushing in; I'm a stiff-armed spectator in continuous applause, on my knees beside a copse of chokeberry, shearing it to the ground, cane by cane” (119).
The alliteration stood out the most to me in the very first essay with “imagination can mutate and mate” (8) and “fertile fronds of cinnamon fern” (9). This playful use of words early in the book allows us to love the swap as she does, before she later explores some of the darker aspects of the landscape. In this essay, the swamp is its most beautiful; in the last, it is the most dangerous. Although she describes thing lyrically in the last essay, such as “the fog freezes solid, a block of gray ice with a bullet splintering through it, a thousand fissures snaking above, beside, beneath me” (136) the long phrases do not have the same snap to it as the descriptions in the first essay.
I found the reading engrossing and did not usually have a problem reading several essays at a time. I attribute this to her creation of place in her writing, that not only did I feel like I was there in the swamp with her, but I wanted to stay there. This is most apparent in images like “From the air, the bridge looks more like a causeway that abruptly halts partway out in the gray waters of the bay; then reappears later” (59).
As a side note, she sure does love bears. Especially female, potentially pregnant bears.
Others have already commented on the poetic nature of Barbara Hurd's language in her essay “Moonmilk” and in this book Stirring the Mud, but I thought that the similarities extend further than just the use of metaphor and the description of landscape. The way that she weaves together art, mythology and spirituality with her imagery of the swamp and her own personal history is perhaps the quality of the essays that make them the most like modern poetry. Poetry is largely about a tying together of two unlike things, often an image with an idea or emotion that one wouldn't normally associate with that image. Hurd does that extensively in her essays. In the first essay in “Stirring the Mud,” she uses the image of the blurry edges of the sway to talk about the human discomfort with the uncategorizable, giving first person examples like her own encouraging poetry students to leave their comfort zone. Likewise, in “Moonmilk” she uses the idea of this rock transformed in to a soft material to explore the changes that occur in human nature as our lives change.
Along with the poetry-like connections at work Hurd's writing has rhythms that sound incredibly lyrical. Although I only had the opportunity to read one of her essays out loud, I was amazed by the rhythms and alliteration that I may not have noticed had I been reading silently. With her skill in rhythm, she is able to capture action and mood while never losing the vividness of the landscape in passages such as “I'm obliterating them in a flurry of repetition, a chat of exorcism I do with my body. Jab, squeeze, open, again and again. The slashed canes collapse against each other. I straighten my arms, lock my elbows, and sever and whack, my hands on long handles pulling out, pushing in; I'm a stiff-armed spectator in continuous applause, on my knees beside a copse of chokeberry, shearing it to the ground, cane by cane” (119).
The alliteration stood out the most to me in the very first essay with “imagination can mutate and mate” (8) and “fertile fronds of cinnamon fern” (9). This playful use of words early in the book allows us to love the swap as she does, before she later explores some of the darker aspects of the landscape. In this essay, the swamp is its most beautiful; in the last, it is the most dangerous. Although she describes thing lyrically in the last essay, such as “the fog freezes solid, a block of gray ice with a bullet splintering through it, a thousand fissures snaking above, beside, beneath me” (136) the long phrases do not have the same snap to it as the descriptions in the first essay.
I found the reading engrossing and did not usually have a problem reading several essays at a time. I attribute this to her creation of place in her writing, that not only did I feel like I was there in the swamp with her, but I wanted to stay there. This is most apparent in images like “From the air, the bridge looks more like a causeway that abruptly halts partway out in the gray waters of the bay; then reappears later” (59).
As a side note, she sure does love bears. Especially female, potentially pregnant bears.
December 20, 2010
Hurd, a poet and naturalist writer, offers an engaging and lyrical set of essays on the natural world -- most of it, intriguingly, exploring some rare bogland near her home in western Maryland. A lot of it has to do with the resonances of the natural world with one's personal life, but the most interesting aspect remains the way she delves -- literally and literalily -- into bogs, swamps and marshes, those often feared, undervalued and even despised landscapes that so teem with life.
August 1, 2023
A quote from this book:
"The mud of the swamp reminds me of what I daily forget: something is always stirring, nuzzling, and trying to lick us into shape. We are more malleable than we know, more flexible and lithe, still 90 percent water, still pliant enough to be stirred, congealed into something we can only guess at. This notion of our concrete selves-I, you, they-as beings within our rigid armor, it’s all clumsy, a brittle scaffolding.”
"The mud of the swamp reminds me of what I daily forget: something is always stirring, nuzzling, and trying to lick us into shape. We are more malleable than we know, more flexible and lithe, still 90 percent water, still pliant enough to be stirred, congealed into something we can only guess at. This notion of our concrete selves-I, you, they-as beings within our rigid armor, it’s all clumsy, a brittle scaffolding.”
March 19, 2011
Love this book. Since I wasn't able to be with Leslie while she was taking chemotherapy I sent her this book so that she could be transported away from the depressing process of having these chemicals run into her body. She LOVED this book and was able to have her mind just where Barbara Hurd was, in the bogs, where we both love to be also.
February 15, 2009
This is an elegant collection of essays. Hurd will make you want to go out and play in the swamps, investigate the bogs, and find some way to express it as eloquently as she does. This was a book with dreamy sentences and evocative words that bear rereading and investigation.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews