Life Between the Tides

October 25, 2021
Ondaatje Prize winner Nicolson studies the life that teems inside tide pools in this evocative meditation (after The Seabird’s Cry). “Creatures” are the ocean’s “genes,” he writes, and sheds light on the life that lives along the coast, among them the common prawn, “minuscule adventurers, at home in this world, with pitch-perfect neutral buoyancy, floating in their stillness neither up nor down” and whose limbs serve “different functions—manducatory, for chewing, ambulatory, for walking, natatory, for swimming.” There’s a fascinating section on “the dramas of crab life,” as Nicolson baits the creatures with bacon and watches males “fight hard over access to females.” A chapter on vibrant, many-colored anemones references a young T.S. Eliot, whose family spent summers near Gloucester, Mass., where the poet saw “a sea anemone for the first time,” an event that influenced Eliot’s writing, Nicolson suggests. The author’s wonder is infectious, and he makes a convincing case that to better understand the sea, people must pay more attention: “Go to the rocks and the living will say hello.” As poetic as it is enlightening, this is tough to put down. Illus. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

Starred review from February 4, 2022

Award-winning author Nicolson (The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers) combines poetry and marine life in his meditative look at the seashore near his home in the Scottish Highlands. Observing plants, animals and microorganisms in concert with seasons, tides and one another, he feels the slipperiness of seaweed; tastes the salt air; and listens to the rain and screeching birds. Nicolson builds three rock pools in the bay to watch firsthand as sandhoppers leap and anemones attack. The culture, traditions, and industry of people, both modern and ancient, play a role in this story as do the rocks and tides. Nicolson ties the work of naturalists, poets, philosophers, and current scientists into his contemplation of time, presence, and refuge. VERDICT Nicolson's lyrical history and description of one ecosystem is active, thoughtful, and inviting and will appeal to both the scientific and literary minded.--Catherine Lantz

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Starred review from December 1, 2021
If you intend to share wonderment over a place of complex, ever-in-flux beauty, your language had best be as dynamic as what you're seeking to celebrate. In the mode of Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea, distinguished British writer Nicolson (The Seabird's Cry, 2018) succeeds gloriously in conveying the marvels of a stretch of Scottish tidal coast, mixing history, science, and precise descriptions bright with inventive metaphors and profound revelations. Not content to merely observe, Nicolson plunges into slime, "slutch," and "slither-gloop" in pursuit of such "hidden" creatures as the sandhopper, a tiny crustacean, and digs rock pools (with permission) to create little tide-buffeted ecosystems. As he scrutinizes prawns, each as "intricate as a space station," periwinkles, anemones, crabs (whose competition for sex he declares "Shakespearean"), and the intricately symbiotic relationships that keep edge-of-the-sea life in balance, Nicolson pursues his key theme of how closely related we are to all of Earth's animals. He finds evidence of these connections in the numerous traits we share with other species, from memory to fear, ""recognizing the continuities between animal and human consciousness." Nicolson also chronicles human life on this precarious land, delving into myths, rituals, clans, poverty, and war, and portraying scientists who zealously studied this realm of oceanic churn. Ultimately and inevitably, Nicolson explains how our fossil-fuel habit threatens the grand complexity of life he so vibrantly evokes.

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Starred review from December 15, 2021
A journey into the wonderment of a tidal inlet. Memoirist, historian, and nature writer Nicolson brings capacious erudition and acute sensitivity to his intimate investigation of the ebb, the flow, and the teeming variety of life in tidal pools. Like William Blake, who saw the world in a grain of sand, Nicolson sees the universe, and humans' meaning within it, in that liminal, ever changing habitat. The shore, he writes, quoting poet Seamus Heaney, "is where 'things overflow the brim of the usual, ' and that brim is at the heart of this book." Along the coast of Scotland, Nicolson created his own tidal pool by digging through Jurassic rock that had been buried for 200 million years. "If tides are our twice-daily connection to the universe," he writes, "the rocks are our ever-present library of time." Soon the pool became home to sandhoppers, prawns, winkles, crabs, anemone, and more--each with its particular biology and behavior, affording the author "repeated chances of ecstatic encounter." Nicolson augments his own lucid observations with those of naturalists, biologists, and zoologists from ancient times to the present, and he enlarges his purview to include Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Herbert Spencer, and Heidegger, among others, for insight into how "the human, the planetary and the animal all interact" in watery topography. Like Virginia Woolf, Nicolson is "entranced by liquidity, which could embody realities that solids could scarcely address." The shore, he writes, "is filled with infinite regressions," from the swelling ocean "into the microscopic." Water inspires deeply philosophical reflection. Above all, the author seeks to illuminate his own place in space and time. "The coexistence with the things of the pool, the being-with them, a total co-presence with them, came to seem like a way of establishing my own being in the world," he writes. To be-with is the only way to be." Illustrated with photographs and delicate drawings, this book is a marvel.

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