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On Tidal Shifts and What Remains
University of Georgia Press
June 2008
On Sale: June 1, 2008
160 pages
ISBN: 0820331023
EAN: 9780820331027
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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." 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.
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