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Books : The Peregrine (New York Review Books Classics)
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Rating: 
- Superb, distinctive and unforgettable
I haven't ever reviewed anything on Amazon before but felt compelled to seeing that this astonishing book has not yet had one. The Peregrine, written by the reclusive librarian and naturalist J.A.Baker is a unique work, and certainly the best modern prose nature writing I have encountered. It should take its place beside Manley Hopkins notebooks and poems and the poetry of Les Murray and Ted Hughes. It is the last of these is that it most resembles with its intense distillations of natural violence, of planetary process seen in the local and nature seen without romantic overlay, functioning beyond human consciousness. The book consists of a short essay on the natural history of the peregrine falcon followed by an edited diary of days spent watching a few individuals over one winter and spring. There is therefore a repetition of days out watching, dawns and dusks, which becomes deeply hypnotic. Baker eschews any autobiographical writing; it is the inhuman drama of the birds lives that the reader becomes immersed in. He has a facility for metaphor every bit as good as Hughes' and, as in Hughes, the effect produced is of shockingly vivid arrest of the natural world. It is simply some of the best prose I have read.
In short, The Peregrine is unlike anything I have read before, a book that I will continue to live with and quite probably reread once a year. Do not delay before discovering this remarkable work.
- Superb, distinctive and unforgettableI haven't ever reviewed anything on Amazon before but felt compelled to seeing that this astonishing book has not yet had one. The Peregrine, written by the reclusive librarian and naturalist J.A.Baker is a unique work, and certainly the best modern prose nature writing I have encountered. It should take its place beside Manley Hopkins notebooks and poems and the poetry of Les Murray and Ted Hughes. It is the last of these is that it most resembles with its intense distillations of natural violence, of planetary process seen in the local and nature seen without romantic overlay, functioning beyond human consciousness. The book consists of a short essay on the natural history of the peregrine falcon followed by an edited diary of days spent watching a few individuals over one winter and spring. There is therefore a repetition of days out watching, dawns and dusks, which becomes deeply hypnotic. Baker eschews any autobiographical writing; it is the inhuman drama of the birds lives that the reader becomes immersed in. He has a facility for metaphor every bit as good as Hughes' and, as in Hughes, the effect produced is of shockingly vivid arrest of the natural world. It is simply some of the best prose I have read.
In short, The Peregrine is unlike anything I have read before, a book that I will continue to live with and quite probably reread once a year. Do not delay before discovering this remarkable work.