The Lost Words: A Spell Book, By Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, Anansi, 2018, 120 pages.

There is a growing schism between people and the natural world.  Robert Macfarlane has sought to close this gap.  His books include Landmarks and Underland. Jackie Morris has sought to narrow similar gulfs in her acclaimed children’s books, which include The Quiet Music of Gently Falling Snow and The Wild Swans.  Their impulses were triggered when the Oxford Junior Dictionary, used in schools around the world, dropped approximately forty common nature terms from their edition. These words included: acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, heather, fern, and willow.  The replacements words include broadband, blog, and voice-mail.

For Children and Adults

One might imagine a celebration of these nature words would take the form of a children’s book. However,  a few seconds with the coffee-table tome reveal artistry appropriate for all ages. The influences of the author for adults and the author of works for children permeate the pages in tandem.  This book doesn’t just celebrate. It conjures essences. Poems capture the nature of life in the natural world. Illustrations evoke wonder and underlying melancholy for what is missing from our lives and our references.

Poems and Artistry

These words and illustrations do cast a spell that animate the lost words. Poems begin their lines from each letter in a lost word.   One poem summons a woodland groundcover of bluebells. It ends with the lines:

Blue flows at the blue hour: color is current, undertow/Enter the wood with care, my love/Lest you are pulled down by the hue/Lost in the depths, drowned in blue.

The spell cast for the heron riffs off each letter evoking the strength and agility of the heron and ends with the N.

Now heron hauls himself into flight-early aviator, heavy freighter-and with steady wingbeats boosts his way through evening light to roost.

Honors

The Lost Words has been honored by the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for distinguished illustration in a book for children, BAMB Beautiful Book Award, Hay Festival Book of the year, and as a Sunday Times top ten bestsellers.

Published first in the UK, every page has resonance for a US audience. Macfarlane and Morris succeed at conjuring back these lost words with haunting illustrations, wordplay, and narrative.  It’s up to us to take it from there.

Previously published in a WI Sierra Club Publication, by Amy Lou Jenkins.

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