Bill O'driscoll's Reviews > Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

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.