Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Have you ever danced a folk waltz? With someone who knows how? Floating, flying, fleeting—fantastic. Opening The Lost Spells is like stepping into a room of flannel-clad strangers who dance like gods. It is a book of what was once called poetry: words that conjure meaning through our ears’ encounter with their sounds. These new “spells to be spoken aloud,” urge us to wonder at real, half-forgotten things, like egrets and oaks, swifts and silver birches, and the sound of spoken rhymes. They invite us to stray into a fading world that is steeped in the spirituality of physical experience. Naturalist-writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris crafted their 2017 The Lost Words in response to the removal of such terms as “acorn,” “wren,” and “dandelion” from a popular juvenile dictionary. The astonishingly beautiful, oversized volume weaves watercolor with verse to protest our blindness to the wild things around us. A diminutive companion to The Lost Words, The Lost Spells continues to plumb what Macfarlane calls “loss—of language, species, loved places—[which] is the tune of the times.” Knowing and naming nature demands physical presence. Yet, identifying the exquisite order of a moth wing or beech leaf is not merely sensorial, but spiritual. It reveals something of ourselves: our own vitality, fragility, and design. When nature is displaced, whether from our surroundings or our lexicon, we lose a thread of connection with our own being. As simulated experiences increasingly supplant physical ones, we find ourselves aliens to our own metaphysics. Like spoken poetry and social dance, nature study has become an activity of small children and eccentric subcultures. Can books like The Lost Spells renew our ability to marvel at our landscapes and ourselves? As the virus accelerates our virtual interactions, our need for physical contact and spiritual solace grows more urgent. Macfarlane’s and Morris’ work could not be more timely. My only fear is that the book is too beautiful. I responded with reflexive horror when my five-year-old pulled it from its package by one cover. To see its satiny dust jacket torn or its silken ribbon frayed would pain any aesthetic sensibility. However, his enthusiasm gives hope that The Lost Spells will grow lustrous with wear as it enchants us into abandoning our avatars for authentic marvel and mystery.