H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
285 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 2 to September 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
There's something about the commingling of exquisitely perceptive nature writing with a raw, emotional, viscerally depicted memoir of personal grief and loss that sinks right into the quiet silt and calcified fossils in my heart. The most obvious parallel for this book is, of course, Wild by Cheryl Strayed: like Strayed, Macdonald is crushed under her grief for the loss of a parent and eventually immerses herself in a particular sense of wildness in order to reorder her life and fill the void. But Macdonald's prose is sensitive and keen in ways Strayed's good but not brilliant wording could never be, recalling Macdonald's peers in modern English nature prose-poetry, such as Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin. Macfarlane's grief at the passing of Deakin, in fact, makes his The Wild Places something of an exact analog. Macdonald, however, avoids the philosophical abstractions of Macfarlane and the contented noodling of Deakin to craft her own direct, incisive language of hurt and literal bewilderment. I have to go all the way back to the brilliance of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost to find a proper comparison: another near-perfect examination of loss and landscape.
Macdonald additionally interweaves a fascinating portrayal of T. H. White, most pertinently the author of The Goshawk, whose psychological profile provides both parallels and contrasts for Macdonald's own emotional burdens. Her psychosexual analysis of White is possibly too pat -- White's bumbling mistreatment of his beloved Gos probably doesn't tie in quite so directly with White's childhood abuse and suppressed desires -- but Macdonald makes of it fascinating reading.
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