Prior to the publication of this volume, identification of Antarctic mosses was often marred by nomenclatural inaccuracies in the literature and misdeterminations of specimens. Lewis Smith, until recently a senior ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, has worked extensively on cryptogam research in Antarctica for over 40 years. The authors' intimate knowledge of the Antarctic biome and of mosses shines through: Ryszard Ochyra is a renowned moss taxonomist Halina Bednarek-Ochyra is a renowned illustrator and bryophyte taxonomist and Ronald I. A beautiful, self-contained account of what is the major component of the Antarctic flora, this book represents the culmination of many years of meticulous research and extensive fieldwork. It complements The liverwort flora of Antarctica ( Bednarek-Ochyra et al., 2000), so that now Antarctica can boast the best bryophyte floras of anywhere in the world. Moss builds elliptical, mounting dread throughout the novel to prepare us for the catastrophe that comes at the end.This is the first modern flora to provide a comprehensive description of all known species and varieties of moss in the Antarctic biome. In Summerwater, the land of the dead is never far off.
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Auden wrote, how the "glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed, / And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead." But it is also about deep time, how personal dramas are swallowed by wind and water along with the towns and civilizations. It's a poem about welcoming strangers, of course, one of Moss's persistent themes, including in her wonderful recent novel Ghost Wall. (The same idea is acted out, in less elevated form, when we spit off ledges into bodies of water: "There's something about fatal drops that makes you want to launch a bit of yourself, just a mouthful, over the edge," a character thinks).īook Reviews 'Ghost Wall' Is An Eerie Coming-Of-Age Tale That Begs For A Second Read This correspondence is most apparent in the pattering, sensual way she writes about water, as something in us and outside of us, flowing through us, and making us up, a reminder that we are not as separate from the natural world as we sometimes think.
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Summerwater is full of little half rhymes between human and other, between domestic and wild: the way coffee steam rises like "the mist between the trees," the way rain "simmers" in puddles like water on the stove. to identify the book's themes as domestic or interpersonal would be to miss what makes Moss's work so distinctive: the lovely countermelodies of earth, animal, and sky that contextualize human dramas.īut to identify the book's themes as domestic or interpersonal would be to miss what makes Moss's work so distinctive: the lovely countermelodies of earth, animal, and sky that contextualize human dramas, the way her work has that special "seriousness accorded to the ground under our feet only by toddlers and botanists," as one character thinks while watching her young daughter study rocks.
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