The Lost Words and The Lost Spells contain some gorgeous poems from Robert Macfarlane, all prompted by a single word from British wildlife, which then is the title of these poems. The artwork is beautiful too, made by Jackie Morris, and reading the poems accompanied by the watercolours feels like walking through nature. I keep coming back to it when I’m bored at home.
The books themselves have a very nice meaning behind them aswell, where it aims to inspire children to go back and discover nature again, instead of forgetting it, losing themselves to the growing urban landscape.
The poems themselves are very bouncy, almost song-like, (which was the intention, seen as they title themselves as spellbooks). They are all also acrostic, where each stanza starts with the letters that spell out the word in the title.
I particularly love Starling as, to me, it sounds almost like the call of the bird itself when you say it out loud. The constant, back and forth, repetition, and then a sudden cutoff, and going on to the next stanza:
Starling
by Robert Macfarlane
Should green-as-moss be mixed with
blue-of-steel be mixed with gleam-of-gold
you’d still fall short by far of the-
Tar-bright oil-slick sheen and
gloss of starling wing.
And if you sampled sneaker-squeaks
and car alarms and phone ringtones
you’d still come nowhere near the-
Rooftop riprap street-smart
hip-hop of starling song
Let shade clasp coal clasp pitch
clasp storm clasp witch,
they’d still be pale beside the-
In-the-dead-of-night-black, cave-black,
head-cocked, fight-back gleam of starling eye.
Northern lights teaching shoaling fish teaching
swarming flies teaching clouding ink
would never learn the-
Ghostly swirling surging whirling melting
murmuration of starling flock.
Of course, reading the poem in this format comes nowhere near reading it from the big A3 book itself, aswell as the artwork…