Harris said it was at the back of judges’ minds that it had already won a big literary prize but “it’s very hard to say: ‘OK, this has had its place in the sun’”. Woven into the book is a biography of TH White, who also tried to train a goshawk more than 60 years before her. It tells of how the Cambridge historian, illustrator and naturalist was so overcome by grief after the death of her father that she went almost mad and decided to train the most untameable of raptors, the goshawk. Plenty falls.Helen Macdonald (left) poses with other Costa book award nominees, Ali Smith, Emma Healey, Jonathan Edwards and Kate Saunders. This grace, a candour tipped to cede darkness with orderĪn aeolian matte stripped as soft as the image of breathīronze against bronze where the cupped hand In disks of water and a rapid participatory graceĮlements of predation holding the eye & not without risk
In doorways apostrophising is acceptable currencyĪnd light also fell into it. & all I can do is concur with a real figure of speech, you move, you die. One of the most beautiful, figuratively speaking propositions is tired of you In soft genuflections of denomination and rescue. Perfunctorily stropped as a beak or a bladeįolding the light back to the chest where it frays The very notions of welfare and well-being themselves Sessile cast of light seems meticulous in its suffering & coercion sets itself pastimes, very sure of itselfīringing a little light into our world and then some Wake, in a room where soft plaster has fallen Melodic, opulent, shrewd, incisive, these poems are a celebration of the natural world and a profound meditation on being alive in it. In this brief selection, Macdonald focuses on images from a landscape-the ocean, a fox sparrow on blue stone, stars, roads “whose tunnels were hillsides,” a lot of light (“meticulous in its suffering” and “boring, beautiful light”)-and then turns inward to consider the human consciousness that witnesses, processes, and alters the landscape.
Musical and syntactically daring, her poems probe what it means to be awake and watchful. Prior to writing that book, she published a collection of poetry called Shaler’s Fish, which is now publishing in the US for the first time. Helen Macdonald received international acclaim for her award-winning memoir, H Is for Hawk.
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