Helen Jukes – A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings

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A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings, Bees, Book Review, Helen Jukes, The Natural World

And is there honey still for tea………..

Helen Jukes’ A Honeybee heart has Five Openings is a sweet, not saccharine, warm account, filled with the sense of purposeful, satisfying, meaningful feel-good which bees seem to symbolise

It fits neatly into a growing genre of writing-about-the-natural-world which not only includes much interesting scientific information, but is also full of emotional meaning, to the writer herself, as the subjects become part of her own biography, and also casts a wider, philosophical, historical, and even one could say political/environmental net. She explores bees themselves, but her book does not place the writer outside beeworld. She talks about relationship, the relationship she has with the bees, and they with her. This is a book about another species, sure, but not purely a rational, objective analysis of that species. The writer is changed by her encounters with them.

This should certainly appeal to all those who devoured Helen MacDonald’s soulful and intense H is for Hawk. And may even sit better with readers who perhaps were at stages of their own lives where the intensity of emotion which MacDonald explored in her journey, was too much. H is for Hawk certainly had this reader at times riven with connection to my own human suffering. Jukes’ book inhabits some sunnier uplands, and does not take the reader into the darkness of the soul which, surely, we all have at times.

Reading it was an unalloyed pleasure, deeply fascinating

The author felt a calling, after moving from London, where she had at one point assisted a professional who helps those wanting to beekeep, to Oxford. She was at a point in her life where the grind of office work and its stresses seemed to be disconnecting her from inhabiting, properly, her own life – the rush many of us feel trapped in, which can feel aimless and lacking a real direction.

I like the thought of a stability that comes from fine-tuned communication, and not the sayso of a single ruler. It must be a restless kind of stability , I think. The messages come constantly and from all around, and catching them is more about receptivity than reach

Bees were both a way to get physical, and out of that kind of metropolitan chatter head, and to be present. Under their influence, Jukes’ found space and time made for reflection and connection. Bee teaching! Friendships, and more are deepened, as the author found how her own connections to the bees were enabling her to open up more to human connections. Bee meditations!

Through this experience of beekeeping, of learning about and listening tot the colony, I might have called something up – might have begun to articulate and name a capacity I was missing, a connection I needed…..A particular kind of sensitivity, a quality of attention which is…almost like a substance itself……What to do with a feeling like that – which is not rational, and doesn’t fit with the usual categories – except to notice it silently and with a sideways grin as it becomes part of my day-to-day

To sum up, far more beautifully, something about bee-teaching, than I can conceptualise, is this lovely quote from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet

Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.

I received this as a digital review copy, via Net Galley, and absolutely recommend it. Maybe if we all kept bees we might learn how to cooperate with each other …at times, it seems as if human beings are (at least on the world stage) more interested in taking hornets as role models!

A Honeybee heart has five openings UK
A Honeybee heart has five openings USA

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Christopher Somerville – The January Man

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Book Review, Christopher Somerville, The January Man, The Natural World, Walking

Walking the poetry of landscape, wildlife, relationship and music through the years

I  have been waiting since last summer to post a review of this wonderful book here on the blog. I had received, and reviewed it, on Amazon UK, as it was offered to me on Amazon Vine, where I was bound to review it within a month. No point in sharing it here at that point, since it is not due to be published until mid January 2017. Shame, really as I think keen walkers, keen philosophers and reflective types (which must include serious readers, surely) keen engagers with the natural world, keen yearners-for-beautiful-writing-on-the-natural-world, keen lovers of music, of history, of good conversation, and, well, those with any kind of keen-ness to appreciate life-in-real connection would Have welcomed finding this book in their Christmas stockings Enough preamble:

What can I say to justifiably praise this deep, joyous and poignant book?

Christopher Somerville is a travel writer, specialising not in exotic tales of derring-do in sub tropical or polar Lonely Planet inaccessibility, but in travelling, on foot, through the hidden and not so hidden highways and byways of these isles.

This particular book, taking as its springing-off point a folk song entitled ‘The January Man’ recounts the months of the year, and some walks undertaken in those months in different parts of the British Isles.

From March:

Frogs are at risk. There are no wallflowers in the ranine ballrooms of romance. The opening notes of spring have stung all the sleepers into a conga of love. They singlemindedly pursue their search for partners across high roads and dual carriageways. Toads are at it, too, with just as much gusto as their froggy cousins. They teem recklessly out of the ponds and ditches along the old Roman road from Bristol to Wells. Randy toads and frogs with reproduction on their minds are run down and flattened by the dozen, martyrs of love on the B3134

Somerville writes most beautifully, evoking the landscape itself, painting the vegetation, illuminating the chatter of many birds, so that the armchair reader, feverishly polishing their boots and raring to get outside, can, in imagination pour themselves into the territory the author is describing. But he writes about so much more than this. Whilst walking in place, he also walks in time. Some of these, in fact most of these, are walks he has done decades before, so he is accompanied by his younger self, and, most poignantly, by his dead father John. John was a keen walker. The relationship between John and Christopher was at times a little estranged, difficult and distant, caused by the times and the great and rapid change in cultures and generations, post war. John had a reserve to do with that war, and also due to his occupation – he worked at GCHQ Cheltenham, so discussions of what he did were off-limits.

Fathers didn’t make mistakes. They knew what to do. They showed you how to ndope the tissue wings of a model glider and paint a bedside cupboard nwith smelly green gloss. They gave you a florin if you cleaned the car properly with a chamois leather, they spoke sternly to you about your school report, and they chastised you if you hit your sister or cheeked your mother. They were upright and dutiful, the object of everyone’s respect and admiration. They set the moral bar so high it daunted you

The reserved father and the child of the 50s and 60s found the beginning of meeting places in walks they took together.

Walking in the present, often meeting people who recount their lives and the lives of their parents in the specific regions he visits, he is also meditating on history, geography, culture and deepening his connection to his own family, whether his loved, now gone, father, or appreciating his present connections to his family and friends. Celebrations, often traditional and local of the  passing of the seasons are woven through this book; folk songs, folk music and dancing connect present with the past.

Aerial view of May Hill, copyright to Peter Randall Cook. Commons

From May, walking before dawn  as a seasonal ritual on May Day morning, up May Hill in Gloucestershire

Every bird in these woods is silent. There’s only the sound of our breathing, the faint creak of boot leather and the glassy tinkle of the stones. Then ahead a dog barks, and a blackbird breaks out scolding. It turns to tentative notes, sweet and unsure. A wren whirrs briefly. A robin begins to chitter, and deeper in the wood a warbler produces some sweet, expressive phrases. By the time we leave the edge of the wood and enter the common land of May Hill top, the dawn chorus has got under way. There’s another musical sound, too, faint but growing louder, coming up behind us – the silver jingle of tiny bells, bound round the shins of three men who are walking the hill in ribbon coats and breeches

I wiped away tears, moved by descriptions of landscape and wildlife, not to mention the recounting of human connections to those landscapes as well as to each other, as I read

And, over and again, having found a most wondrous version of the song, The January Man, on YouTube, performed by Christy Moore, I played this, its plangent rendition revealing the layers in the deceptively simple lyrics about the months of the year, and the man who moves through them

The only thing I missed through being lucky enough to have this as an ARC for review, is that there will be maps and walkers notes when the book is published, not available here.

But what I did find is that Somerville has a blog, and a walking website, where he adds new walks, photos and descriptions and much more besides, each fortnight. I’m sure details of a terrific walk, somewhere near any of us, is either there already or will be, waiting to be explored……….Christopher Somerville’s website where you can gorge on links to many walks and more

Somerville is a rambler and a rover, all over this land, And, to be honest, his writing holds the benison of rambling and roving – not to lose or to fox you, but to surprise and stop you, making you draw breath and notice. This is far from a linear journey, this book. Rather it is a spiders web, suddenly sparkling, where every thread makes you notice the sure connections to every other thread, a woven whole.

I didn’t underline what I was reading – because it could and would have been everything, as almost everything I read made me glimpse words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts – or, the poignancy of the meaning of ‘June’ in that January Man song ‘the man inside the man’ – by which I loosened gender, because, what Somerville was revealing to me was something about who any of us, all of us, each of us is inside the passing external we show to the world

As is obvious, I recommend it. It will be published on January 12th

The January Man Amazon UK
The January Man Amazon USA

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

Olivia Laing – To The River

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Book Review, Nature Writing, Olivia Laing, River Ouse, The Natural World, To The River

Walking the river flow

Just as some people have perfect pitch, which they can then learn to tune even more finely, and some have eyes which are attuned to see ever finer gradations of tone, colour and shade, and can then further train and refine this gift, some, I believe, resonate with a precision and refinement towards words, language itself, and are capable of conceptualising and describing the world new-minted, fresh, present. And will also then further refine this resonance.

Such a one is Olivia Laing, as this marvellous book effortlessly demonstrates. When I say ‘effortlessly’ I don’t mean that its construction necessarily came trippingly and fully formed for the writer – maybe it did, I don’t know – but that the reader has no sense of affect being striven for, no sense of ‘my, what beautiful writing’ in terms of showy flashness in description. It isn’t that I read with a sense of ‘what a beautiful description of a sunset’ – more, I read without effort, slowly, presently, observantly. Sentence followed sentence, and both the parts and the whole just WERE. This is authentic writing, and from first to last I just had the sense, which might often come with music which is balanced, and somehow winds the listener more deeply into itself, that ‘this is the moment; and this; and this’

Laing has written a walking journey the length of the River Ouse, which effortlessly weaves the long history of the planet, of geological time and evolution, with recorded historical fact, with the industry of place, with social history – and with the short lives of individuals, and how they connect to place. She renders all fascination, and the powerful presence of her writing had me reading with a kind of breathlessness, heart and lungs almost afraid to move on, so much did I want to ingest and inhabit each step of the journey, each sentence of the book.

Presiding over all, for Laing, and moving through the feel of the book, is Virginia Woolf, who, as we know, on a day in 1941 walked out into the Ouse with a pocket full of stones. Woolf was a woman perhaps too finely calibrated for the world, sharing with some other writers with an exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, a feeling too attuned to unsheathed nerve endings, unmyelinated. But what such writers can do is perhaps to waken and unwrap those of us who are too tightly sheathed AGAINST perception.

Laing solidly walks the journey, feet well on the ground, noticing, noticing.

I could have taken virtually any and every sentence from her book to illustrate the harmony, perception, reflection of her writing. I did start underlining, but quickly abandoned, as the book itself needs underlining.

The path spilled on down a long lion-coloured meadow into a valley lined with ashes. There the river ran in riffles over the gravel beds that the sea trout need to breed. I crossed it at Hammerhill Bridge, running milky in the sun, and climbed east again into Hammerhill Copse.The land had lain open to the morning and now it seemed to close up like a clam. There was a woman’s coat hanging over the gate to the wood, the chain padlocked about it like a belt. Who drops a coat in a wood? The label had been cut out, and the pink satin lining was stippled by mould

Reading this book, I feel invited, constantly, by the writer, to both inhabit the presence of the time and place of her journey, and, in an echo of Robert Frost’s poem, stay aware of the other paths and possibilities that might have been taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other,

I too am left wondering the story of that coat…….and other snags to possibilities she uncovers and suggests, on the journey. She is being compared to W.G. Sebald in her writing and her subject matter, winding the reader in, still further in, worlds within worlds, to the source. I don’t think this is mere marketers puff.

To The River : A Journey Beneath The Surface Amazon UK
To The River : A Journey Beneath The Surface Amazon USA

Elizabeth Gilbert – The Signature Of All Things

Tags

Book Review, Botany, Elizabeth Gilbert, Natural Selection, The Natural World, The Signature Of All Things

“A Violet by a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye” – Passion, sexuality and botanical obsessions

Elizabeth Gilbert’s book title, The Signature of All Things, relates to the ancient, metaphysical herbal theory of The Doctrine of Signatures, originally espoused by Jacob Boehme, which found its way into the Renaissance Herbals like Nicholas Culpeper.

This is a wonderful, historical novel which will particularly delight anyone with an interest in botany, the development of ideas which led to the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, trail-blazing self-taught female scientists, and the dichotomy and struggle between mysticism and pragmatism.

The central character of this book is Alma Whittaker, born at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. She is the daughter of a couple of very plain speaking, wonderfully forthright people for whom plants are a passion and a livelihood. Daughter of an English under-gardener and a Dutch horticulturalist, Alma is brought up in Pennsylvania. Possessed of no beauty but fierce intelligence and spirit she is raised as a freethinking intellectual. Her family circumstances are odd, quirky, eccentric and then some. She is spirited, has dry wit, strong sexual drives which unfortunately are a torment rather than a delight since she does not possess either sexual allure, nor does she fit the mould expected, as the mores of the early nineteenth century look for cultivation, rather than plain-speaking, and modest, flirtatious, male-ego bolstering whims, frills and furbelows rather than a willingness to argue, debate, question and ridicule stupidity.

Alma is an utter delight however for a reader, as it is her feisty, intelligent, curious nature, her very delight in the processes of life itself, and her insatiable thirst to know about the workings of things which is captivating.

During the first hundred or so pages I was absolutely convinced this was a novelised biography, so deep and detailed and involved is all the botanical information, delivered with such delight and passion. Particularly as various naturalists, plant specialists, explorers and scientists make tangential appearance in these pages – Joseph Banks, Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Captain Cook. So I searched for the papers published by our bryologist Alma Whittaker and found………….well what I found made me admire Gilbert’s work even more!

This is a novel which touches on big ideas – which globe trots England, Holland, Pennsylvania, Tahiti, which is quite forthright about female sexual desires, but is not written to titillate, which is at times enormously funny as well as incredibly sad and suffering, and overall, because of Alma’s nature, overflows with delight in the messy stuff of life itself, its anguish and its excitement.

If you only want the page turn of story, there might be frustrations, because our heroine has to linger at the page turn of thought, debate, analysis – it is why does this happen which is the driver, rather more than `and what happens next’ – though much DOES.

The vibrant sprawl of the book IS its delight

My only cavil (as someone who loves botanical plates) I wanted MORE of those lovely black and white line drawings, to pore over and savour.

How could a reader fail to be entranced by the story of Alma Whittaker, from her sturdy babyhood to her 80s, when her nature is to tender and so practical, so stroppy and so adventurous, so bruised and so resilient:

“She adopted a handsome little caterpillar (handsome by caterpillar standards), and rolled him into a leaf to take home as a friend, though she later accidentally murdered him by sitting on him. That was a severe blow, but one carried on.”

Plain Alma appreciates beauty in others, but is raised to accept she is not, and never will be, beautiful, but her pragmatic parents also consider beauty is not so important

“Alma enjoyed the act of sketching……….Her first successes were some quite good renderings of umbels – those hollow-stemmed, flat-flowered members of the carrot family. Her umbels were accurate, though she wished they were more than accurate; she wished they were beautiful. She said as much to her mother, who corrected her: “Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.” “

There are a lot of oppositional tensions in this book, which get explored both in intellectual argument between characters, and in the friction and oppositions between characters themselves, and what is playing out in the wider world, both scientifically and politically.

I thoroughly recommend this big rambunctious book and its unrefined, forthright heroine whose presence is an affront to prissy refinement!

I received this as a review copy from the Amazon Vine Programme UK

The Signature of All Things Amazon UK
The Signature of All Things Amazon USA

Richard Mabey – The Perfumier and The Stinkhorn

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Book Review, Richard Mabey, The Natural World, The Perfumier and The Stinkhorn

A perfect balance on the tightrope between rational science and poetic sensibilities

Richard Mabey is a naturalist whose analytical scientific training is married with a personality which is of a strong feeling, imaginative tone, which causes his relationship with the natural world to be strongly congruent with the sense of dynamic mystery in nature which infuses the poetry of the Romantics and Metaphysicals.

Or, as Mabey himself puts it, in a more sensuous, impassioned and precise manner:

When I’m occasionally called a ‘Romantic naturalist’ I wonder whether it’s an accusation as much as a description : the meticulous observations of the natural scientist corrupted by my overheated imagination: objectivity compromised by my Romantic insistence on making feelings part of the equation……………….nature isn’t a machine to be dispassionately dissected, but a community of which we, the observers, are inextricably part. And that our feelings about that community are a perfectly proper subject for reflection, because they shape our relationship with it”

For me Mabey’s writings on the natural world are as perfect as they can get.

Analytical observation and objective research reins in the tendency to become febrile with ineffable meaning, and the sense of the numinous ever present prevents a dissection which kills the essence it is trying to understand.

Snipe’s eye View

In this short and rich book, he examines the natural world through the five senses and that ‘sixth sense’ which he calls a sense of location or place, which may be linked to a felt sense of the earth’s magnetic field.

Each chapter, with its marriage of fact and, not fancy, but feeling about fact presents many riches for thoughtful visioning.

However it was the chapter on the sense of hearing, which focused on birdsong, analysing something deep and wonderful about music, its effect on soul and sense, which I found the most potent and rich of all the potent and rich chapters.

And, perhaps the most delicious nugget of all was not even an observation from Mabey himself, but a quoting of Richard Dawkins, who makes a stunning, wonderful bridge of science and art in his analysis and explanation of the links between Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, and the possible effect of particular sequences of sound waves upon the brain – whether the brain of a human listener or a female nightingale :

“Taking his cue from the phrase ….
‘and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk’
he suggests that the idea of a nightingale song working like a drug isn’t entirely far-fetched………..Dawkins argues : ……‘The song is not informing the female but manipulating her. It is not so much changing what the female knows but directly changing the physiological state of her brain. It is acting like a drug’ 

This short book is definitely one for the re-read and re-read again and again shelf, rich in anecdote, meaning and juicy factual nugget!

There are beautiful woodcut style black and white illustrations to accompany the text, which are as delightful and to-be-savoured as the writing itself

The Perfumier and The Stinkhorn Amazon UK
The Perfumier and The Stinkhorn Amazon USA

Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places

Tags

Book Review, Nature Writing, Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, The Natural World, The Wild Places

There are Wild Places Almost Round The Corner

Robert Macfarlane writes a lyric, prose poem to the English landscape, which I enjoyed enormously, but with a sense of panic and loss, during the first two thirds of the book, where his focus on ‘wild places’ were those areas probably untouched by man, almost impossible to access (you need, paradoxically, a car to get you within a day or so’s walk of them!!) and, of course, disappearing fast. He focuses inevitably upon the far North (Scotland) and the far West (Ireland)

However, as he moves South, walking with his friend the late wonderful Roger Deakin, he begins to shift emphasis, and ‘sees heaven in a grain of sand’ – the wild is not only far away and up mountains, the wild is also the untramelled, fertile growth of green things, the way nature reclaims landscapes, though of course, even this is under threat as we rip out hedgerows, tarmac the earth and lay roads. Macfarlane shifts his view from ‘big wild’ – high snow capped mountains, harsh and cold, to small, almost secret wild, for example, the mysterious ‘hollow ways’ relics of our past walkings, of landscapes eroded by feet, hooves, cartwheels and water, to form hidden ravine type lanes, particularly in the chalklands.

I also really was taken with his exploration of mapping, and the difference between our measured, linear maps – OS and road maps, and another kind of mapping, which tells a story and is the narrative of a person or a community in connection with their landscape.

The book also serves as the story of a lovely kindred soul friendship between him and Deakin.

Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places Amazon UK
Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places Amazon USA

Esther Woolfson – Corvus: A Life With Birds

Tags

Animal behaviour, Book Review, Corvus, Esther Woolfson, The Natural World

Crow, Chicken, Rules The Roost!,

The warm, lyrical and thoughtful account of a family’s relationships with the wild birds who have consented to share house space with them is a beautiful read, by turns informative, reflective, mystical, tender and amusing.

Woolfson’s writing both details the individual relationships she has with each ‘companion bird’ who stalks her house – ‘Top Bird’ seems to be Chicken, the crow, and also makes some very telling points about mankind’s troublesome, often arrogant and blinkered attitude to the other species we share the planet with.

For example…..’bird brain’ is used as a term of abuse to indicate lack of intelligence. More modern understanding of the anatomy and physiology of avian brains has re-categorised specific bird brain structures and functions, leading to a newer understanding that relative to their overall size, some birds have very big brains indeed, particularly the areas of the brain associated with memory; and, particularly in some species – most notably the corvids, a big fore-brain, comparatively equal, given size, to primates!

The scientific and the personal reflection and anecdote seamlessly are woven together. I learned much from this book – even if I could never be as laid back and tolerant as Woolfson in my cross-species relationships. Corvids habitually ‘cache’ and hide all sorts of items, both edible and non-edible. Woolfson casually recounts how Chicken would cache pieces of flaked fish in the turnups of her jeans!

                          Flicr, Commons: Eva8’s photostream

Off to respectfully share some time and space with the crows in my local park, if that’s OK with them!

Corvus: A Life With Birds Amazon UK
Corvus: A Life With Birds Amazon USA

Kathleen Jamie – Sightlines

Tags

Book Review, Kathleen Jamie, Scottish writer, Sightlines, The Natural World

Weaving connections everywhere

I can only concur with the praise heaped on Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie. This is writing about the natural world of a very high order indeed, engaging with beautiful and precise descriptions of what she sees and experiences in a very satisfying way, but, even more pertinently, taking off into other philosophical and thoughtful areas. It is far more than beautiful descriptive prose about birds wheeling against the skyline or the majestic loneliness of mountains against the horizon.

So, for example, one essay about gannets on a gannetry beyond the Shetlands, has her musing (this being a nursery after all) about her own children, and the different relationships between mother and child in other species.

Helicobacter Wiki Commons

Another, highly unusual ‘natural world’ examination, is under the lens of a microscope, looking at tumours in biopsies, and at Helicobacter. She equates this microscopic world to the known world of landscape, seeing inlets, sandbanks, gullies, and bacteria like ‘musk oxen on tundra,seen from far above’ Pastoral bacteria, feeding on the gorgeous turf of stomach lining. And, for me, that heart stopping sentence in this essay:

That’s the deal: if we are to be alive and available for joy and discovery, then it’s as an animal body, available for cancer and infection and pain

Blue Whale Rib Cage

Whether it is the delights of cleaning a long dead whale’s ribs with a toothbrush (!) or going into the earth as if walking inside its body, to visit Paleolithic cave paintings, Jamie is thoughtful, and thought provoking

She embraces the obviously poetic and the mundane, and, like a true poet, sees the poetry in the mundane, using language which is the antithesis of the fey. This is nature writing which engages with the viscera and with sinew

I now have her earlier work, Findings, waiting to be read

I originally received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine Programme UK
Sightlines Amazon UK
Sightlines Amazon USA

Elisabeth Tova Bailey – The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating

Tags

Autobiography, Book Review, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, Meditation, Science and nature, The Natural World, The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s long meditation on, of all things, a snail, is a beautiful thing. A modest, unostentatious and tender account of one year confined to a sick bed, at times close to dying, kept alive in hope and spirit by connection with a snail. Life slowed down to simplicity and snail time as living at human speed becomes impossible.

Victim of a lethal mystery virus – possibly Lyme disease, possibly also ME, possibly tick-borne encephalitis, Tova Bailey has written an account of one year of her history of debilitating illness. Observing a snail brought to her on a violet plant by a friend provides deep immersion into what it means to be human by contrast with what it means to be snail. Tova Bailey explores with interest the lives of snails – but this is much more than a fascinating introduction to gastropods. Its a beautiful illustration of Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ quote above – anything, no matter how humble, can open into wonder and provide ‘thoughts that do lie too deep for tears’

Oh, and if you think ‘well I’m not the least interested in snails, horrid creatures’ prepare to be seduced into seeing a snail from a changed perspective, gently shown the blinkered quality of your previous snail view by this delightful snailscape!

Another writer with a brilliant ability to show the natural world in a deeply reflective, transcendent manner is Sharman Apt Russell Anatomy Of A Rose: The Secret Life of Flowers and An Obsession With Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect

Admittedly Tova Bailey’s subject is rather more unusual – many of us love roses and butterflies, and both of them have acquired mythological and mystical connections – but Snails??? Prepare to be enchanted.

Snail (of course!) Wikimedia Commons

I was reminded of just how much I had been moved, enchanted and come into being present, by the reading of this reflective, modest book, by another blogger’s post about it – here is a ping back to that review

I originally received the book as an ARC from the Amazon Vine Programme, UK

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating Amazon UK
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating Amazon USA