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

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.