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For Christmas last year, I gave a typesetting to my grown daughter that enchanted me when I paged through it in a bookstore in Maine. I carried it home and read it imbricate to cover, savoring its suggestive poems well-nigh plants and animals and its magical illustrations, surpassing I wrapped it and put it under the tree. And then, without she’d opened it, I read it then with her. Who was that present really for, you may ask?
I’ve been meaning to share The Lost Words (2017) by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris, with you overly since. Consider this your pre-holiday opportunity to buy it for your own child or grandchild or, plane better, for yourself. And as it turns out, a follow-up to The Lost Words was recently published tabbed The Lost Spells. I will be checking that one out soon.
The Lost Words is a typesetting for lovers of language and nature, and it has a clever hook, as the when imbricate explains:
“When the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary — widely used in schools virtually the world — was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that virtually forty worldwide words concerning nature had been dropped. The words were no longer stuff used unbearable by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these ‘lost words’ included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail….
In response, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a ‘spell book’ that would conjure when twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words then into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to gloat the wonder and importance of everyday nature.”
When the word blog has displaced wren (which is my daughter’s middle name and one of my favorite birds in the garden) in an supervisory source used by children — well, this blogger figures she’d largest well-wisher for the lost words! Look at the tableau above, from the installment tabbed wren. Do you see w-r-e-n spelled out in a ghostly wren’s trill? This is how the first page of each lost word begins — with a word and what it represents almost gone, but not quite. You can still pick it out if you try.
The next page presents a “spell” — an acrostic poem, where the first letter of each line spells out the title vertically — well-nigh the lost creature or plant. Read the spell aloud, and you bring it to life! The unprepossessing or plant appears on the facing page, a single, fleshed-out specimen emerging from moody colors, as if stuff magically coaxed to life from a faded tapestry.
Each poem dazzles the ear with wordplay, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and rhyme. Macfarlane evokes each living creature with words that, expressly when read aloud, conjure its essence. Of the darting, hopping wren he writes:
“Rapid wren is needle, rapid wren is pin — and wren’s song
is sharp-song, briar-song, thorn-song, and wren’s flight
is dart-flight, flick-flight, light-flight, yes —
Each wren etches, stitches, switches, glitches, yes —
Now you think you see wren, now you know you don’t.”
After reading the spell, you turn the page — and there’s the wren in living color, in abundance, darting through a thorny shrub. The spell has worked its magic. The wren exists again!
Here’s bramble.
“Bramble is on the march again,
Rolling and arching withal the hedges, into parks on the municipality edges.
All streets are suddenly thick with briar: cars snarled fast, merchantry over…
Bramble has reached each house now, looped it in wire. People lock doors, tropical shutters.
Little shoots steal through keyholes, to leave — in quiet halls,
Empty stairwells — bowls of unexceptionable blackberries where the light falls.”
And there it is — bramble, in all its prickly, berrying glory, working with hungry birds. Who can resist this? Not me. I’ve brought all the lost words to life at my house. Maybe you’ll want to do the same at yours.
One last detail: this is an oversized hardback book, the largest to revere the illustrations. Buy unbearable wrapping paper.
Disclosure: I bought a reprinting of The Lost Words and reviewed it at my own discretion and without any compensation. This post, as with everything at Digging, is my personal opinion.
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All material © 2022 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
The post Read This: The Lost Words, a spell typesetting to bring nature when to life appeared first on Digging.
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