Frostburg - Despite forecasts of a snowy night tonight, a crowd filled the seats in Main Street Books at 7:30 p.m. to hear award-winning writer Barbara Hurd read from her latest book, Walking the Wrack Line:  Of Tidal Shifts and What Remains.  This is the latest in a trilogy of books in which Hurd's poetic voice and scrupulous attention to quirky detail render nature's offerings--whether strange in themselves or seemingly ordinary--in fresh, thought-provoking ways.  She read three essays from Walking the Wrack Line:  "Moonsnail:  Unseemly Proportions"; "Beached Icebergs:  Erasable Truths"; and "Spider Crab:  Disguise."  Hurd explained that the subject of each essay was an object she had found that a wrack line--that area of beach that is exposed during low tide--and that the subtitle of each relates to what those objects suggested to her as she wrote about them.   

Hurd's reading was introduced by Dr. Keith Schlegel, professor emeritus of English at Frostburg State University, where Hurd also teaches.  Because Schlegel introduced her book so eloquently, I am reprinting his words here in their entirety. 

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Keith Schlegel:   

How can I introduce Barbara Hurd to this audience?  After all, everyone here already knows her, right?  And if you don't know her work, get with the program.  You've got some reading to do.  Lucky you.

By way of introduction, I could read tonight from any of her five separately published titles, but of course she does that so much better and that's why she's here tonight and why we're here, to hear Barbara read from her latest, Walking the Wrack Line:  Of Tidal Shifts and What Remains.  This is the latest--we'll not say the last--in what is now a trilogy but what could be a quartet or quintet or more of Barbara's lyrical prose meditations.  These have focused on images in special environments of our earth:  first swamps, then caves, and now the wrack line, that limit of the high tide that deposits a line of debris on the coast.  For the grand-daddy of American poets, Walk Whitman, this was the liminal zone between water and land, a boundary landscape upon which he projected both the mother-sea and father-land, but Barbara Hurd tells us that when she set out to write Walking the Wrack Line she purposely challenged herself to write without metaphor.  Instead of a landscape, instead of a mind gazing out to sea or contemplating about the meeting of the sea and land, she writes in this book about objects, once living, never living, still living, busted, flawed, worn, miniscule, hidden, open, repulsive, and, yes, beautiful objects that appear by chance, sometimes by remotest chance--objects deposited at her feet, objects that stir her mind which enters then into associations difficult for readers to predict.

We learn much about the natural world here, but better yet we read about an unquiet mind eavesdropping on itself.  The point is less information about objects than the effects of close observation upon the subject.  The settings--in Europe, northern Africa, the Caribbean, Alaska, both coasts of the United States--she has told me, are, were, accidental, and chance again plays its essential part.  Everywhere on these coasts is the wrack line, but what has been left remaining there as the tides have shifted is immensely varied and surprising, a provocation not just to the senses but to a sense of order.

Of the form of Walking the Wrack Line:  Of Tidal Shifts and What Remains and of Stirring the Mud and Entering the Stone, Barb has said that the straddling of prose and poetry, the elevated attention to sound and rhythm and the introspective point of view merged with the coherence of the essay fits the way her mind works.  But even this synthesis of forms, this loose and large and flappy Bedouin tent with camels sticking their noses under from all sides, is transcended as Barbara asks such imponderables as "Why do we need coherence?"  "How do things fall apart?"  "What's the value of the accidents of visions?"  "What are the pleasures of aversions?" Indeed, "What is the use of ugliness?"  There's even a bit of horror science fiction in this book.  I'm thinking of the passage in which Barbara sees in the snail something like a fantasy for your nightmares, an image and deconstructed metaphor--you see that metaphor couldn't, after all, be held at bay forever--for what we mean when we say we "spill our guts."  What are snails like?  They are like "errant body parts," maybe like "a lost piece of intestine coming alive without us, slouching on dark street corners with their bleery beery talk to anyone who would listen."  Yikes.

She's got our attention, doesn't she?  Let's listen.

 

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Reviewers also love this latest Hurd offering: 

From Publisher's Weekly:  "[T]his lyrical book with its scrupulous attention to language and the world will please poets and naturalists alike." 

From Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio:  "There's scarcely anyone writing better about the natural world than the much-unheralded Barbara Hurd."

 

Copies of the book, with a limited number signed by the author, are available at Main Street Books in Frostburg.