This Watery World

In this wonderfully wide-ranging volume, Vartan Messier and Nandita Batra have given us a fine collection of maritime riches. From reflections on the ocean as metaphor to shark documentaries and Jaws, from Hemingway’s organic ecology to Melville’s tropic-birds and the establishment of a Puerto Rican maritime preserve, This Watery World reminds us that—onshore and inland—we are all in the grip of our images and interactions with the sea. When I put this book down I was reminded of the Hyderabadi poet Sarojini Naidu: “The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades all.”—Professor Ashton Nichols, editor of Romantic Natural Histories and author of The Poetics of Epiphany and The Revolutionary “I”