BOOK OF THE WEEK

Seasons of Storm and Wonder, by Jim Crumley, Saraband, £25

It is difficult to do justice to a book of such knowledge and emotional heft as Jim Crumley’s latest and profoundly meditative work.

It is packed with familiar themes, to stunning effect throughout – listening to the land, connections between all living things, making oneself part of the landscape through stillness and respect, awareness of the fragility of biodiversity and the balance needed between progress and rewilding.

Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2022, the book stresses the dichotomy between the terms, ‘wildlife’ and ‘management’ as Crumley does in his previous books on the four seasons, but the dilemma seems even more immediate, as we look at the overall impact of climate emergency in a single volume.

Other central aspects are his deference to work by other nature writers such as Seton Gordon, John Muir, Gavin Maxwell and Mike Tomkies, Gaelic names for birds and plants (laisair-choille, ‘flash of fire’ for green woodpecker), alongside literary, poetic and artistic acknowledgements of nature. References to Cezanne and Rothko illuminate the light and shade of our mountains and the broad white sands on Scotland’s shores but it is Crumley’s own knowledge of Scottish wildlife and terrain that sparkles, with mesmerising descriptions of birds in flight, an eider duck’s stillness, a roe deer’s sense of mountain paths and his own ken of Scots pine forests on mountainsides.

Be it autumn, winter, spring or summer, reading this guide and thinking of it on solitary sojourns will heighten the delights of Scotland’s diverse land and seascapes, reminding you that “everything in the universe is connected to everything else”. Soulsearchers can do no better than meditating by the waterfall in the regenerated natural woodland at Glen Finglas, while reading Barry Lopez’s quote from Arctic Dreams, “the land is like poetry… it has the power to elevate the consideration of human life” but the penultimate words should surely come from Crumley himself as he meets the gaze of a black-browed albatross, amongst a sea of gannets in Shetland, and reflects that “nature is all there is”.

His endnote on the devastation of gannets at Bass Rock through avian flu reminds us that we must use all the resources we can and pitch these alongside our will to sustain the wonders of Scotland’s wildlife, because “we are nature itself ” – that is the essential truth and the core message of this beautiful book.