V's Reviews > Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

(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.