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. For centuries, they – and their inhabitants – have been the object of our distrust. 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.In Swamp Songs<\/i>, 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. Here are tales of shepherds, smugglers and salt-gatherers; of mangroves and machismo, frogs and fishermen. And of carp soup, tiger gods, flamingos and floods.A dazzling exploration of lives lived on the fringes of civilisation, Swamp Songs<\/i> is a vital reappraisal and vibrant celebration of people and environments closely intertwined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twilit and sinister, oozing with ague, bad airs, boggarts and other spirits: in the mind’s eye marshes, bogs and swamps are dangerous, crepuscular – and only partly of this world. For centuries wetlands – and their inhabitants – have been the object of our distrust: we’ve drained away their demons, encroached upon and denuded them, ripping away not only their fragile beauty, botany and birdlife, but also the carefully calibrated lives of those that have come to understand and thrive in them. Tom Blass takes us on a journey through these strange lands and waterscapes. Travelling from Romney Marsh to Virginia, from Lapland to the Danube Delta, he meets and engages with the inhabitants of some of the world’s least understood and precarious places, some of which are on the brink of obliteration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[98],"product_tag":[121,587],"class_list":{"0":"post-95217","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","5":"product_cat-nat-history-popular-science","6":"product_tag-natural-history","7":"product_tag-prose-non-fiction","8":"pa_book_author-blass-tom","9":"pa_cover-hardback","10":"pa_dewey-304-209169-edition23","11":"pa_imprint-bloomsbury","12":"pa_language-english","13":"pa_pages-8500","14":"pa_publisher-bloomsbury","15":"pa_readership-general-trade-code-k","17":"first","18":"onbackorder","19":"taxable","20":"shipping-taxable","21":"purchasable","22":"product-type-simple"},"yoast_head":"\n