Description
A remarkable meditative foray into the strange and seductive beauty of swamps and bogs."Barbara Hurd writes about people with the canny poise of Cheever, and about nature with the loving exactitude of Thoreau. And everywhere in her work is a speculative energy and elegance that make her essays a rare achievement." -J. D. McClatchy, author of The Rest of the Way
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Stirring the Mud steeps the reader in the strange and seductive beauty of swamps and bogs - a landscape where "the bulbous and mottled hoods" of skunk cabbage poke everywhere through the mud: "Hundreds of hunched, tiny Yodas whispering, Feel the force, Luke. Feel the force." Barbara Hurd writes of the allure and taboo of mud; of the ancient bog sacrifice of Tollund Man ("Was he supposed to teach us, staring at this actual face two thousand years later, something about courage?"); and of the way a rare bog turtle outfitted with a radio transmitter can become a metaphor for human desire ("Isn't this what we all want - to burrow in the mud and still have someone nearby who can tune in to our frequency? Who can find us no matter how deeply we've dug ourselves in?").
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