The elegant meditative essays in Stirring the Mud five years ago introduced me to Barbara Hurd, a naturalist and poet. Walking The Wrack Line (Univ. of Georgia, $22.95) is a beautiful addition to Hurd’s naturalist writings. A wrack line is the odd assortment of seaweed, shell fragments, driftwood, and plastic detritus left behind by a high tide. Combing beaches from New England to Morocco, Hurd “begins to listen for rhythms and repetitions” in seemingly disconnected fragments. Like Terry Tempest Williams, she searches for pattern, convergence, and coherence in the random shoreline tidal debris. In childhood she cherished the perfectly preserved shells on her dresser, but Hurd’s adult passion is for the salvageable and transformable: “I’m more interested these days in what might be rescued from near destruction, from invisibility, from silence.”
