The Traveling Tide (Conversation Pieces, Vol.5)

Rosaleen Love's stories play with the notion of vast aeons of time--time as experienced (or not) at the various levels of being, from the glacial to the organic, from the geological and the ecological to the human and posthuman levels. Within you'll find images of the sea and its stories.
The tales inThe Traveling Tide fairly dance and sing their way along the page, whether the scene is music itself, as in the tale she tells of driving her cousin Bridie, an Australian musicologist and jazz pianist, on a pilgrimage to the source of her music in the US South, or the vast vistas of geological time, or even the arcane science of therolinguistics as it deconstructs the c(h)oral songs that are a series of texts written by air in water. Carmel Bird writes of the final story in the volume, ''Once Giants Roamed the Earth,'' ''This story is informed with deep concern for beauty of the earth and speaks urgently for respect and dignity. There is an air of menace and yet a pervasive hum of hope. The writing is firm, confident, and compelling.''