Stirring the Mud

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 Hood 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?")

Maryland's Finzel and Cranesville Swamps are the author's staging grounds for uncannily rich forays into mythology, literature, and eastern spirituality. Barbara Hurd's great gift as a writer is to make us experience this terrain as a place to nourish our spiritual and imaginative selves, as a landscape that reminds us that "what hungers in us is so large. What we feed it is so small."