Thursday, January 10, 2019

Treasure hunt …

… Litanies of Reclamation:A Review of The Lost Words by Sally Thomas. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In The Lost Words, Macfarlane and Morris aim to restore an imaginative vision of the natural world. Macfarlane might have contented himself with simply listing and defining those words lost to the dictionary, pairing them with Morris’s breathtaking illustrations. An illustrated nature dictionary would have been, in itself, a magical-enough book. But in making each “lost word” a poem, Macfarlane has revived not only the word itself, but language as an experience. The book’s subtitle labels it “A Spell Book,” and its poems are incantatory, each one a litany of reclamation.

No comments:

Post a Comment