#SWAMP SONG MEASURE SERIES#

Part travelogue, part history book and part anthropological study, Blass's intensely rewarding memoir succeeds in scattering some light into the North Sea's cold and murky depths, revealing both its wonders and its indivisible relationship with humanity * Independent * Terrifically enjoyable * Literary Review *Ĭaptivating. I was relieved to find that his work is not of the trendy Thoreau-esque school of travel writing, but more down to earth. Tom Blass champions a subtlety of vision, a determination to discern the marvellous in the unprepossessing * Daily Telegraph * His gaze misses nothing, and his robust prose glitters with story and lore and surprise - Philip MarsdenĪ hugely enjoyable anti-tour, and a wonderful eulogy to an implacable ocean * Times Literary Supplement * PRAISE FOR THE NAKED SHORE : Tom Blass's The Naked Shore is a wonderfully bracing journey around the North Sea. Swamp Songs is a delicious blend of ecology and culture. What a joy to roam with Tom Blass through some of nature's most unjustly maligned and underappreciated habitats, where webs of life interconnect wildly and wondrously with human stories. PRAISE FOR SWAMP SONGS: Enriching and magical, Tom Blass's writing is a pleasure to read. Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC ISBN: 9781408884355 Number of pages: 336 Dimensions: 234 x 153 mm MEDIA REVIEWS In the north of their range, savannah thickets constitute an important part of their habitat, while in the south they are strongly associated with river systems and marshes, for which they are named. It is native to western and southern Central Africa. And of carp soup, tiger gods, flamingos and floods.Ī dazzling exploration of lives lived on the fringes of civilisation, Swamp Songs is a vital reappraisal and vibrant celebration of people and environments closely intertwined. The swamp boubou (Laniarius bicolor), also known as the Gabon boubou, is a species of bird in the Malaconotidae or bushshrike family. Here are tales of shepherds, smugglers and salt-gatherers of mangroves and machismo, frogs and fishermen.

#SWAMP SONG MEASURE SERIES#

In Swamp Songs, Tom Blass journeys through a series of such watery landscapes, from Romney Marsh to North Carolina, from Lapland to the Danube Delta and on to the Bay of Bengal, encountering those whose very existence has been shaped by wetlands, their myths and hidden histories. We have tried to drain away their demons and tame them, destroying their fragile beauty, botany and birdlife, along with the carefully calibrated lives of those who have come to understand and thrive in them. For centuries, they - and their inhabitants - have been the object of our distrust.

Oozing with bad airs, boggarts and other spirits, the world's marshes and swamps are often seen as sinister, permanently twilit - and only partly of this earth.

Swamp song measure