Although many acclaimed photographers have focused their cameras on the Mississippi Delta, no photographer, until now, has attempted to produce an interpretation of the land itself. The images in this book, the work of Maude Schuyler Clay between 1993 and 1998, are the result of the first such undertaking.<BR>Clay has preserved through photography the communities of both whites and African Americans of the Delta region.<BR>In an introductory essay that populates Clay's almost peopleless settings, fiction writer Lewis Nordan tells how these photographs evoke his Delta boyhood. Like her images, his memories are in black-and-white, "the color of grief and all its metaphors." In Clay's terrains, Nordan sees the Delta land that is at once memorable, familiar, and astonishing.