‘SAYING SOMETHING OUT LOUD HAS A POWER’
When Robert Macfarlane talks about nature, a beatific glow spreads across his face. It’s a look of unfeigned delight, a smile that brims with wonder. “Every morning I take five minutes to sit in the garden, close my eyes and try to unweave the many threads of song and sounds around me,” the author says on a Zoom call from his home in Cambridge. “This morning it was the bin lorry,” he laughs. “But it was also the two goldfinches and the wood pigeon.”
‘We’ve almost run out of language to describe and evoke breakdown and warming’
Ask Macfarlane what language means to him and he’ll answer that it’s an ecology – “a complex , an illustrated collection of “spell-poems”, conceived alongside the acclaimed artist Jackie Morris, in response to the removal of the names of certain plants and animals from children’s dictionaries due to their lack of everyday use. Lost words such as “acorn” and “bluebell”; disappearing names such as “kingfisher” and “wren”.
