Helen MacDonald – H is for Hawk

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Autobiography, Birds, Book Review, Books about Books, Falconry, H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald, The Natural World

Love, death and the wild, wide world

Helen MacDonald’s aching, raw story of loss and relationship speaks so much of longing that reading it is as much about being fed, sustained by grief, as her hawk is fed by the death it has dealt. Indeed the two, love and death, are linked.

We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost

We love because we will lose, or be lost to, that which we love. It’s the presence of death which fiercens the love. Mabel, Helen’s hawk, is of course overwhelmingly real – but that reality is thickened by all the metaphors accreting to her. The potency is the potency of what the hawk represents, in history, in literature, in imagination to us.

Wiki Commons, Photographer Steve Garvie

To me she was bright, vital, secure in her place in the world. Every tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away, There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge

There are 3 major strands in this book. The first, which created or re-created all the rest, is the loss of MacDonald’s father, Alisdair MacDonald, the photojournalist, and the bottomless grief that brought a sundering of relationship, an absence.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will be a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are

As a child, MacDonald had been obsessed, possessed by falcons, birds of prey, and then, specifically, the goshawk. So the second strand is the making of relationship. She returns to everything that initial possession was about, and engages on building a relationship with a goshawk. Which she discovers can only be done by negating herself, becoming an absence, as, initially, in any way, the presence of human is too harsh for the incredibly highly charged, responsive, awareness of a terrified hawk. Human space can only become tolerable to hawk by the patience to not intrude

And, finally, she examines another writer T.H. White. White was also a passionate hawker. He was a man painfully within his challenging contradictions. Like the goshawk, one with a charged, reactive nervous system. White had recorded his own story of relationship with goshawk, The Goshawk. I hope that the success of MacDonald’s book encourages the re-publishing of White’s, as I’m now anxious to read it.

Much of White’s account (there are plenty of extracts in MacDonald’s book) is dark, anguished, irrational. And much of MacDonald’s book is also outside the rational – there are many accounts of her vivid dreams, the boiling of raging emotions, the unendurable overwhelm of feeling. But this is part of the power of this book. We are not creatures of reason alone, reason the visible tip of a fiery iceberg beneath.

MacDonald’s book was another one of those which I read with a sense of some deep value I can’t articulate – through a mist of weeping. The value is that of having, often, no idea at all of the why of that weeping. All I can say is that, for me, weeping without any obvious, recognisable emotion behind the weeping is a way in which my body seems to respond to something being named from a place of authenticity. Reason says ‘I don’t understand’ but, on some deep level, the fabric of my being responded

In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.

A book this raw and personal somehow calls forth the raw and personal response from the reader. I would have liked to have read it slowly and savouringly, and maybe this is what I’ll be able to do, at some point, on a re-read, as I know the writing is very fine, and the information, about hawks, landscapes, T.H. White, and more, of interest. But I was not able to read it like that. Instead, a savage gulping down of chunks of it, thrown this way and that by feeling and sensation. Longing, I suppose. That desire to experience the world through the sinews of some other than human understanding.

H is for Hawk Amazon UK
H is for Hawk Amazon USA

Birdsong: 150 British and Irish Birds and their amazing sounds

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Birds, Birdsong: 150 British and Irish Birds, Jan Pedersen, Jonathan Elphick, Lars Svensson

A flock of birds inside a book

This is a stunningly good idea. Bring together learning birds through visual and aural identification in one container. Sure, you can have a CD and gravitate to the track number whist looking at the book, but trying to constantly replay the track number is a fiddle and a half.

This is perfect. A beautiful photograph of your bird (customary arrangement in families) with text giving further information, AND gorgeous line drawings (for some species) generally showing the difference in male and female plumage, and at the top of the page information about the track number(s) of their song and call. You key that in to the attached player, and birdsong fills the room.

I have a few cavils, one more primary, two fairly minor, though these do not reduce ‘I love this book’ to ‘I like this book’:

Wikimedia Commons, Common!

I really like line drawings, as well as photos, so would have liked every bird as an opportunity to show the artist’s as well as the photographer’s, skill. Artists can show subtle differences which a photo may not – for example slight colour difference in the depth of grey between the Common and Arctic Tern. Sure, text can explain that the Arctic generally lacks the small black tip to the beak which the Common has, but closely studying a picture imprints this on the mind better.(the example I give IS illustrated, and I’m using it to show the value of such drawings) I just wonder how much more I could have seen had there been a line drawing of a Lesser Black-backed gull to compare with the drawing of the Great.

I prefer to see size of each bird separated out as information under the name, rather than buried in the text, AND to be given for each bird. Occasionally this is missing – e.g. the Whooper Swan ‘roughly the same size as Mute Swans’. After all, sometimes difference in size IS the identification, so a quick flick comparison is helpful (not that one would be taking this chunky book into the field)

Thirdly, aesthetically, I wish that the hard front cover of the book had been extended so that it covered the speaker. This would have looked more appealing, protected the speaker, and, anyway, they did just that for the back cover. After all you wouldn’t be playing a track without needing to look up its number, so the unextended cover serves no practical use (except for making the open book less wide)

I enjoyed this book SO much. Though I admit my cats are a little confused, they don’t respond to the small bird-song, but larger or unfamiliar birds have them searching beneath and behind the furniture. They know where the sound is coming from, as they look at me holding the book with puzzlement, particularly if they are sitting next to me, but obviously the bird is not on my lap, so they rather sensibly look for a place a bird could hide, even if the sound isn’t in the hiding place. Not having a Mute Swan (it hisses!) under the bed is probably quite a good idea, for cat health and safety, all things considered!

Of course, this is not a FIELD guide, unless you like walking whilst burdened down with steamer trunks and a bevy of matching suitcases, but it is a book for the studying of song so that at some future point you will hear, know and recognise!

As this is a very British and Irish Birds Guide and a very heavy British and Irish Birds Guide at that it may not be one to pack in the luggage for your planned visit from abroad walking holiday! I know a similar format exists with North American BirdsI received this originally as an ARC through Amazon Vine UK
Birdsong: 150 British and Irish Birds
The authors are: Jonathan Elphick, Jan Pedersen and Lars Svensson