UNDERTONES Gifts of a Southern Tide

This is a book soaked in salt. The seasons move through the pages, storms blow through it, and the tides rise and fall. Take a slow walk through those pages and you will see things: whelk, Spanish moss, cypress knees, a great blue heron, and the drama of salty creeks, estuaries, spartina. It is a world of movement where barnacles seethe, water pulses, shadows lengthen and nets are thrown. The language in "Undertones" is as active as the world it describes. Things flutter, slice and fly. The beautiful black and white photos reveal the same world as the prose, a world beneath our world, beside it, always there if we just have the eyes, and curiosity, to see it. Your guides to this world see more than most of us. They look deeply, below the surface and the human grid, into the mystery. But then they are generous enough bring us along, to let us see, too. The images and sentences, made by mother and son, work together to let us enter this older, shadowed world. They slow us down and let us see the poetry of old docks, encrusted driftwood, and human artifacts sand-stained and made primal. Take an hour and settle into this book, and the effect will be not unlike that of sinking down into a place.