Grove/Atlantic: 8/25/20
review copy; 288 pages
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald is a very highly
recommended collection of 41 essays and meditations on the natural
world. This is a collection of her best loved essays, along
with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing
countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private
vespers while trying to fall asleep.
As she writes: I hope that this book works a little like a Wunderkammer. It is full of
strange things and it is concerned with the quality of wonder. and... Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the
deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment:
finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see
through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of
looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to
love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of
things.
Vesper Flights fulfills her hope admirably. The essays
are written in a poetic manner with an insight, clarity, and
descriptiveness that immediately pulls you into seeing the natural world
through her eyes and perhaps alter the way you currently look at the
natural world. Humans tend to anthropomorphize the natural world rather
than trying to viewing it realistically. Macdonald's descriptions and
insight help assist in creating a true picture of the subject while
providing insight into both the animal and human world. The writing is
wonderful and the tone she sets helped bring a peaceful calm feeling to
the forefront during a stressful time.
Contents include: An Introduction; Nest; Nothing Like a Pig; Inspector Calls ; Field Guides; Tekels Park; High-Rise; The Human Flock; The Student’s Tale; Ants; Symptomatic; Sex, Death, Mushrooms; Winter Woods; Eclipse; In Her Orbit; Hares; Lost, But Catching Up; Swan Upping; Nestboxes; Deer in the Headlights; The Falcon and the Tower; Vesper Flights; In Spight of Prisons; Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres; The Observatory; Wicken; Storm; Murmurations; A Cuckoo in the House; The Arrow-Stork; Ashes; A Handful of Corn; Berries; Cherry Stones; Birds, Tabled; Hiding; Eulogy; Rescue; Goats; Dispatches from the Valleys; The Numinous Ordinary; What Animals Taught Me; Acknowledgements.
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