Stirring the Mud
On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

Barbara Hurd

"Hurd is a consummate naturalist, writing with the grace and precision of a Peter Matthiessen or an Annie Dillard."—Los Angeles Times

Reviews

"Hurd is a consummate naturalist, writing with the grace and precision of a Peter Matthiessen or an Annie Dillard, but she is also remarkably curious about human nature, spinning her discussion to bring in Joseph Campbell, the I Ching, and Thomas Edison. . . . One moment you're holding a bog turtle in the palm of your hand or watching a dragonfly unfold its wings, and the next you're learning how Monet went about exhibiting his water lily canvases in 1922 or why the cold acidic water of peat bogs so perfectly preserves a body. . . . It is a measure of her skill that she steps among these elements so effortlessly, and it is a measure of her ambition that keeps the aperture of her camera wide open to capture what might otherwise have laid hidden in the dark."
—Los Angeles Times

"Delving into these wetlands, she finds in their array of strange fauna and flora an objective correlative to the place in the mind where artistic inspiration occurs: a place of blurred borders, shifting identity, and strange odors, of rot and death, of Zen peacefulness."
—New Yorker


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Description
In these nine evocative essays, Barbara Hurd explores the seductive allure of bogs, swamps, and wetlands. Hurd's forays into the land of carnivorous plants, swamp gas, and bog men provide fertile ground for rich thoughts about mythology, literature, Eastern spirituality, and human longing. In her observations of these muddy environments, she finds ample metaphor for human creativity, imagination, and fear.
Page count: 160 pp.
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.25
  

Paper
List price: $17.95
978-0-8203-3152-2
6/1/2008

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Barbara Hurd is the author of Walking the Wrack Line, Entering the Stone, and a collection of poetry, The Singer's Temple. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Yale Review, Georgia Review, Nimrod, New Letters, and Audubon. Hurd teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University, where she has held the Elkins Professorship, and at the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.