Books & Essays

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  Title:
  Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark
  
  Date Published:
  Mariner Books 2005

  Description:
  In this exhilarating work, Barbara Hurd explores some of the most extraordinary places on earth, from sacred caves in India to secret caves in Arizona. With passionately informed prose, Hurd makes these strange dark spaces -- with their stalactites and blind cave fish and ancient galleries of white flowstone -- come to light, illuminating the natural history and spiritual territory of caves as powerfully as Kathleen Norris portrayed the Dakotas. Entering the Stone provides an awe-inducing tour through a fragile and beautiful subterranean world.
  
  Book Review #1:
  Using a venerable literary device, Hurd explores her inner life through her fascination with caving. Her meditative, flowing prose pauses on sundry people and events in her life, which she illuminates through descriptions and comparisons with her physical surroundings in the subterranean world. Although they are the settings for her musings on vulnerability, solitude, or death, caves also scare Hurd: she opens with an account of a panic attack she once experienced while descending into one. She faced her fear and got right back to spelunking. She also gives rein to thoughts about her deceased father and faces up to the fact that one of her oldest friends is dying. Confessing to a natural reserve, Hurd explains that caves allow her to give in to emotional exuberance: in the dimness fading to darkness, she becomes an intimate perceiver of sound and shape and of the quietude of danger that caves present. Always, Hurd considers why caves draw her in, and though markedly digressive and personal, her essay reveals a questing spirit that will intrigue similarly contemplative readers. Gilbert Taylor Copyright ? American Library Association. All rights reserved
  
  

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  Title:
  Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
  
  Date Published:
  Mariner Books 2003

  Description:
  n 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.
  
  Book Review #1:
  Essayist Hurd posits that the creative spirit thrives in "the sodden ground of swamps where the profusion of growth defies the old image of a wasteland." Judging from this collection of imaginative, evocative essays inspired by Maryland's Finzel and Cranesville swamps, she may be right. Vivid, unusual analogies ("trying to define the edges of a swamp is like trying to put a neatly folded shadow into a dresser drawer") and clever parallels between swamp and human life provide lively and engaging reading. Reflecting on the prevalence of animal-like plants in the swamp, for instance, Hurd infers that "there's a camaraderie here, a tolerance for hybrids and mongrels, a kinship among the patrons of an all-night, half-sunken bar for cross-dressers." Knitting together such diverse subjects as Buddhist philosophy, mythology and her own childhood, Hurd evokes the landscape through a series of unexpected and sometimes fascinating physical and mental wanderings. A pair of shoes left behind in the swamp prompts musings on the allure and taboo of mud. A trip through the New Orleans bayous yields insights into the elusiveness of our thoughts and our very identities. A late fall foray into the swamp in search of a bear becomes a consideration of longing. Hurd's reflective style makes for a relatively slow pace, and the occasional digressions can seem forced. But her musings are poetic, and her loving descriptions of the wetland world will likely convince some readers that there are universal truths lurking out there in the mud and mire. from Publishers Weekly
  
  Book Review #2:
  Swamps and bogs and their mysterious ambiguity??their perch between liquid and solid??hold a peculiar fascination for Hurd, a naturalist and poet who lives near Maryland's Finzel Swamp. 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. "To love a swamp," she writes, is to love "what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised." Copyright ? 2005 The New Yorker
  
  Book Review #3:
  "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 "The deceptive surfaces and disorientations of the swamps of the world are Barbara Hurd's territory. Whether she is tramping the Finzel Swamp of her backyard, or paying homage to Monet's watery vision, or staring into the bog-stained face of Tollund Man, Hurd's essays reverberate with an intimate, reverent understanding of nature, history, and art. The bog-metaphoric, historic, actual-has its large life here, in a book that is gracefully written and fully imagined." -Jane Brox, author of One Thousand Days Like This One
  
  

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