Times and Tides is a memoir of six memorable essays of intensely personal experiences on the coast. From the backwaters and marshes of Delaware Bay, to childhood summers on a fragile barrier island, to the rugged shores of rockbound Maine, Belva Ann Prycel has woven stories of elegant prose and emotional breadth, essays that not only resonate with a love of the coast, but speak to the depths of the human heart. "This work is a gift. Each of these six essays, constructed with flawless sensitivity, needs to be read then set down-not only to savor the choice of words, but what lies hidden in between words, phrases, and sentences-the poignant sense of loss. Times and Tides breathes an atmosphere of melancholy, a fantastic work of writing that it seems to me reveals fragments of a soul." -Ed OestreichAuthor of six collections of published poems and proseDamariscotta, Maine"Belva Ann Prycel has led us into the real life mysteries of the ebb and flow of the times and tides of her inner landscape. Her reflections, seen in streams, rivers, bays and oceans, and in the eye of a whale, remarkably mirror our own. In Prycel's stories, past, present, and future blend in seamless continuity, like magical links to a life force without end." 'My spiritual landscape,' she calls these essays, 'the product of winds and tides and ancestry, extending far beyond my conscious memory.' Times and Tides is a stunning book of prose essays where we face anew our own phases of the moon-of the tides. We breathe deep, and feel a prayer."-Kelly Patton (Brook)Actor, former Artistic Director of John Drew Theatre, East Hampton, N.Y., professor and author