The Nature Pages at OUTRIDER BOOKS

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	Stirring the Mud On Swamps, Bogs and Human Imagination by Barbara Hurd Houghton Mifflin, 2003		Barbara Hurd
	The Finzel and Crandesville swamps of Maryland inspired the nine probing meditations on wetlands and their relationships with mankind that fill this fine collection of nature writing.
	With a style similar to Annie Dillard, combining a naturalist's eye for detail with a poet's voice and a scholar's mind, Barbara Hurd examines murky regions shunned by most and scorned by many. "For centuries, so much in a swamp seemed useless -- all thus muck and dead trees and algae -- and lack of function in our culture means lack of value. What's it for? we want to know. What does it do? We can tick off their benefits on our fingers: they help control flooding or they filter toxic watse, both of which have to do with our physical and economic health," Hurd explains. "But what kind of cultural enlightenment will it take for us to freely say that we value this or that because it is beautiful, because it nourishes the imagination, because it is good for the soul?"		The paradox is that to see clearly, you must learn to see obliquely.  You must look ahead, and, at the same time, widen your peripheral vision so that it extends not just in great arcs around your head, but over the edge, into the margins where the visible and invisible, dreams and reality, land and water, emptiness and profusion mingle.  The sublime is like poetry; it will not be caught or chased down.  It exists at the edge of things -- in the vast margins . . . The imagination loves freedom first, and then form.  And there is an odd kind of freedom in the fringes that comes, in part, from jettisoning our love of function. . .  lack of function in our culture means lack of value.  "What's it for?" we want to know.  "What does it do?"  . . . . But what kind of cultural enlightenment will it take for us to freely say that we value this or that because it is beautiful, or because it nourishes the imagination, because it is good for the soul? (pp. 13-14)
	Although the essays in this book are united by their moory matters, each one stands more or less alone as a separate outing in a muddy place with its own set of adventures and discoveries, from swamp gases and bog men to carnivorous plants and rare turtles. Together they offer unusual entry into forbidding places.
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