“For
the beauty that remains in spite of everything.” (p 205.)
Two Lights is James Roberts’ illustrated
offering of thanksgiving for both the transience and permanence of the natural
world; for the grace of a glimpse of a wolf on a lonely highway; for dusk
falling over a river; for the unchanging stars. Written at a time of great
personal uncertainty and possible loss, Roberts writes about finding meaning in
his relationship with wild things and places.
Two
Lights
speaks to me; I share Roberts’ experience with finding solace and hope in the
natural world; in finding joy even in dark days in the minutiae of nature, the
persistence of life in edgelands, the reclaiming of human-ravished places, and
in the vastness of geological and astronomical time.
Two Lights is not
blinded by optimism; it acknowledges and mourns the destruction of lives both
human and not, but asks us—by example, not preaching—to look for the moments
that transcend. In the half-lights of dawn and dusk, with earth beneath our
feet and the rhythms of walking echoing our heartbeats, barriers dissolve.
An extraordinary account of searching for the wildness left in our world - spanning continents and geological eras, skies and oceans, animals and birds, and even the planets and stars.
With dizzying acuity and insight Roberts paints a portrait of a life and its landscapes, creating precious connections with wild creatures and places, from swans in the Cambrian Mountains to wolves in the Pacific Northwest. By walking at dawn and dusk, in the two lights of awakening and deepening, through the stripped, windswept hills of Wales, and the jungles and savannahs of Africa, he tries to navigate from a soul-stripping…
Ness and Holloway make up the two pieces
authored or co-authored by Robert MacFarlane – one of my five favourite writers
– collected in Ghostways.
Ness, which I believe is meant to be
read aloud, is neither quite poetry nor a play. It explores Orford Ness, a shingle spit in
Suffolk—a place I know as a birding site and nature reserve, but one that has
another deep, layered, secret history. Both disturbing and haunting, there are
echoes for me of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
A holloway is a deeply worn, ancient path,
sunken into the landscape. The one that gives the second part of
Ghostways its nameexplores a holloway in Dorset. It’s partly
written as a memorial to author Roger Deakin, partly as a personal journey, and
a rumination on landscape and meaning. “Stretches of a path might carry
memories of a person just as a person might of a path.” MacFarlane writes, and
“paths run through people as surely as they run through places….”
My own
current work (fiction) in part explores the meaning of memory and place as
filtered through grief, and how landscapes shape individuals, sometimes
indelibly. MacFarlane (and his co-authors) as always, challenges and inspires
me.
In Holloway, "a perfect miniature prose-poem" (William Dalrymple), Macfarlane, artist Stanley Donwood, and writer Dan Richards travel to Dorset, near the south coast of England, to explore a famed "hollowed way"-a path used by walkers and riders for so many centuries that it has become worn far down into the soft golden bedrock of the region.
In Ness, "a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age" (Max Porter), Macfarlane and Donwood create a modern myth about Orford Ness, the ten-mile-long shingle spit that lies off the coast of East Anglia, which the British government used for decades to…
I understand
Alan Garner’s books not literally, but in my gut.
Arising out of the landscape
in which they are set, Treacle Walker tells us a tale of a boy with a
lazy eye and a rag-and-bone man whose lives intersect. An exchange of objects
is made – a gift for a gift, perhaps, freely given. Sight changes. Time changes. Place
changes. How do we separate now from then,
real from dreamt, here from there?
Garner
writes with brevity and spareness; what is not said matters as much as what is.
There is power in language, both in the story and in its creation. As a writer
who tries to say much with few words (but rarely succeeds), I’m awed and tested
by Garner’s work. I began my professional writing life as a poet, and Garner’s
books can be read as prose poetry.
But brevity is misleading: Treacle Walker
is not simple, nor definable as to genre – or perhaps even to its meaning. But
I find myself thinking about it often.
'Playful, moving and wholly remarkable' Guardian
'A small miracle' New Statesman
'Mastery of craft, resonance and deep feeling on every page' Telegraph
An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. Living alone in an old house, he reads comics, collects birds' eggs and plays with his marbles. When, one day, a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears, exchanging an empty jar of a cure-all medicine and a donkey stone for a pair of Joseph's pyjamas and a lamb's shoulder blade, a mysterious friendship develops between them.
A boy of the night-time streets. A girl of
libraries and learning.
Druisius, the son of a merchant, is sixteen
when a cruel order from his father drives him from home and into the danger and
intrigue of the military. Eudekia, a scholar’s daughter, educated and dutiful,
is not meant to be a prince’s bride. In an empire at war, and in a city beset
by famine and unrest, she must prove herself worthy of its throne.
A decade after a first, brief meeting, their
lives intersect again. When a delegation arrives from the lost West, Druisius
is assigned to guard them. In the span of a few weeks, a young captain will
capture the hearts of both Empress and soldier in very different ways, offering
a future neither could've envisioned.
