![]() The kitchen, overlooking a large chestnut tree and a field of barley, is a nest of foraged treasures: bird feathers (including one of Mabel’s, who died just before the book was published), her collection of glasses from extinct American airlines – Pan Am, TWA a guillemot’s skull from a school trip when she was 11. The success of Hawk meant she was able to buy this cottage, crouched between a pub and a church in a tiny Suffolk village. “To talk about nature is to open yourself up to constant grief,” she says. ![]() Where her first book was written “trapped inside the walls” of personal grief, her new collection of essays, Vesper Flights, is a lamentation for the world itself. H Is for Hawk, which tells of her attempts to train a goshawk called Mabel after the sudden death of her father, was at once a devastating memoir and an elegant addition to the burgeoning genre of contemporary nature writing, winning both the Costa book of the year and the Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction in 2014. Loss and grief are the emotional landscape of Macdonald’s work. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |