‘Vesper Flights’ both earthy and lofty
Essays reflect on nature, human and otherwise
When Helen Macdonald scored an unlikely best seller in 2014 with “H Is for Hawk,” the world seemed a very different place. MacDonald’s eccentric, emotionally raw meditation on the death of her father, and her subsequent decision to train a wild goshawk as a means of coping with her grief, was like a still, small retreat from the widening gyre of getting and spending, comings and goings. Now, as a pandemic causes so many of us to live more inwardly, Macdonald’s is a voice of introspection that seems fully suited to the global grief.
Her new book, “Vesper Flights” (Grove Press, 320 pp., ★★★★), is a collection of essays written over the past decade, many for The New York Times and the New Statesman. They mark her as that rare nature writer whose subject is human nature every bit as much as the natural world. Her keenly poetic, elegiac observations trace the fleeting phenomena that surround and contextualize our lives. The descriptive range is sweeping – from migratory birds to brushes with wild boar, and from idyllic childhood memories of an English countryside grayed by development to a sad encounter with a student refugee beset by the authorities and barely clinging to British society.
“Encouraged by books, I’d always been the type of Gothic amateur naturalist who preserved interesting bits of the dead,” she writes in the epic title essay. It’s a head-spinning marvel at the magic of swifts, those screaming, flocking birds Macdonald describes as “creatures of the upper air, and of their nature unintelligible, which makes them more akin to angels. Unlike all other birds, they never descend to the ground.” Swifts will rise, “higher and higher until they disappear from view,” in so-called called vesper flights, vespers being evening devotional prayers, the day’s final and most solemn.
Macdonald moves easily from these deeply personal, spiritual associations to realms of scientific rigor, seeking certainty in the hard evidence of how things work. She meets with a radar
specialist on the observation deck of New York’s Empire State Building to chart the biology of the Manhattan sky, and she studies the grubbiest of the earthbound – glowworms, which are actually wingless beetles with luminescent abdomens, “half intimations of remote stellar distance and half waggling beetle bums.”
In Macdonald’s prose, the correlation between the cosmic and the common is always close at hand, with the high polish and affection for detail of authors who prove their love of things-in-themselves, whether Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry of close inspection or John Updike’s inquisitive elegance.
At its height, MacDonald’s writing
“Encouraged by books, I’d always been the type of Gothic amateur naturalist who preserved interesting bits of the dead.”
Helen Macdonald
captures the inexpressible rhythm of being. She observes, as we all have, the way starlings will move in astonishing, hyper-calibrated unison, making sudden patterns that ink-splash the sky.
“We call them murmurations,” she writes, “but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun.”
Macdonald’s essays are, if anything, murmurations for our ominous time – dark yet flashing, stirred from the core.