![]() ![]() ![]() She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. In her breathtaking new book, “H Is for Hawk,” winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence - and her own - with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering. It calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. If birds are made of air, as the nature writer Sy Montgomery says, then writing a great bird book is a little like dusting for the fingerprints of a ghost. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |