Spring 2008 - University of Georgia Press

June
5 1 ⁄2 x 8 1 ⁄4 | 160 pp.
Cloth, $22.95t | 978-0-8203-3102-7
Walking the Wrack Line
On Tidal Shifts and What Remains
Barbara Hurd
Evocative nature writing in the tradition of Terry Tempest
Williams and Gretel Ehrlich
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.”
Also of interest
Circling Home
John Lane
Cloth, $24.95t | 978-0-8203-3040-2
A Wormsloe Foundation Nature Book
Solitary Goose
Sydney Landon Plum
Cloth, $24.95t | 978-0-8203-2966-6
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.
“This is a beautiful book. It is as skillfully constructed as a poem, and
like a poem its meanings widen. It is a series of fascinating, informative
nature essays, but more deeply it is a series of meditations on ‘what
might be rescued from near-destruction, from silence, from invisibility.’
As such, it becomes spiritual autobiography with a great deal to say,
though almost always indirectly, about human aging and loss.”
—Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of Five Terraces
“In the partial and broken objects she gathers, Hurd finds the
transcendent. Easily braiding observation and reflection, she is a cleareyed
witness to living gracefully with the wrack and ruin of our human
burdens. She is a marvelous writer.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Writing the Sacred into the Real
Jeannine
Barbara Hurd is the author of Stirring the Mud, 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.
Nature
The University of Georgia Press Spring & Summer 2008