Barbara Hurd continues to give nature writing a human dimension in this final volume of her trilogy that began with Stirring the Mud and Entering the Stone.
With prose both eloquent and wise, she examines what washes ashore,
from the angel wing shells to broken oars. Even a merman appears in
this brilliant collection that throws light on the mysterious and the
overlooked.
Writing from beaches as far-flung as Morocco, St. Croix, or Alaska, and
as familiar as California and Cape Cod, she helps us see beauty in the
gruesome feeding process of the moon snail. She holds up an encrusted,
still-sealed message bottle to make tangible the emotional divide
between mother and daughter. She considers a chunk of sea glass and the
possibilities of transformation.
The book began on a beach, Hurd says, "with the realization that a lot
of what I care about survives in spite of--perhaps because of--having
been broken or lost for a while in backward drift. Picking up egg
cases, stones, shells, I kept turning them over--in my hands and in my
mind."
Each chapter starts with close attention to an object--a shell fragment
of a pelican egg, or perhaps a jellyfish--but then widens into larger
concerns: the persistence of habits, desire, disappointments, the lie
of the perfectly preserved, the pleasures of aversions,
transformations, and a phenomenon from physics known as the strange
attractor.
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Walking the Wrack Line
On
Tidal Shifts and What Remains
by
Barbara Hurd
University of Georgia Press,
2008
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a copy
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