Tuesday, January 18, 2022

2022 read #2: Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel.

Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field by John Lewis-Stempel
294 pages
Published 2014
Read from January 9 to January 18
Rating: 3 out of 5

British nature writing, especially the kind that supplies deft insights into the tiny pockets of nature and biodiversity remaining in the British Isles, has long been one of my favorite genres of nature writing, largely thanks to the books by Roger Deakin, Helen Macdonald, and Robert Macfarlane. I had high hopes for this entry, my first book by Lewis-Stempel, and even put it as a suggested Christmas present on the list I gave my partner R late last year.

Despite its lovely cover and intriguing title, Meadowland is merely serviceable, an annual round of both natural events and the rhythms of running a working meadow on a small farm. With my Rust Belt background, for me the word "meadow" invokes a restored wild space, but Lewis-Stempel's more English definition is purely utilitarian: "A meadow is a place where grass and flowers are grown for hay...." While flowers and grasses (and birds and bugs and wild mammals) receive plenty of attention here, cows and sheep and hay-mowing receive almost equal billing.

At times Lewis-Stempel's descriptions approach the ecstatic wonder of Macfarlane or Deakin, but he also has, shall we say, a middle-aged obliviousness to more sensitive phrasing. He employs two casual Nazi metaphors, for instance, both utterly unnecessary and far more distracting than descriptive. I'm not so much offended as struck by how bizarre the choice was.

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