October 2025
About the book
I read Macdonald’s Vesper Flights early this year when we were in Hawaii. Flights is a book of essays mostly about natural history and mostly about birds – though, true to the original meaning of essay, “about” covers a lot of ground. The writing was beautiful, and I not only read the book but studied it to improve my own writing. I’d expected much the same from Hawk.
But Hawk is a very different book. To be sure, the writing is beautiful, and it will repay study, but it is a single-track narrative rather than a series of essays. Hawk traces out two central narratives: one is an account of her training a goshawk and her experiences training, living and hunting with it; intertwined with this narrative is an account of coming to terms with her father’s death, and the period of isolation, depression, and gradual recovery that ensured. Though as I write this, I note that the ‘coming-to-terms’ narrative is really itself a braid that includes childhood memories and an account of the life of T. H. White. Hawk was published in 2014 – I believe it to be her first book, possibly excepting poetry.
I am not going to provide a chapter by chapter account. Rather, my aim here, is just to record the phrases and passages that struck me.
Phrase and Passages I Like
A forest washed pewter with frost (p 5)
But they were loving the space between them, carving it into all sorts of beautiful concentric chords and distances (p 9)
Time passed. The wavelength of light around me shortened. The day built itself. (p 9)
It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. (p 13)
Time didn’t run forward anymore. It was a solid thing; you could press yourself against it and feel it push back; it was a thick fluid, half air, half glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forward and new events backwards… (p 16)
My eyes slipped to the white panels of cut light in the branches behind them (p 21)
But at night, as rain pricked points of orange light against the windows… (p 24)
And I drove and drove, and the roads slipped by and the sky annealed into slews of the hardest white and blue. (p 58)
The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. (p 65)
The feathers down her front are the colour of sunned news-print, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the colour of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight-feathers folded quietly beneath. And there’s a strange grey tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. (p 82)
Ash trees rise in lacy fists (p 104)
The far sky towards Buckingham builds towards dusk in dinted pewter clouds. (p 120)
The sun falls in pale planes on ancient walls… (p 128)
I feel hollow and unhoused, an airy, empty wasps’ nest, a thing made of chewed paper after the frosts have murdered the life within. (p 130)
…there’s a torn-paper whiteness behind the sun that speaks of frost to come. (p 147)
…the quivering silk runs like light on water all the way to my feet. (p 148)
The train curved and sunlight fell against the window, obscuring the passing fields with a mesh of silver light. I closed my eyes against the glare and remembered the spider silk. (p 150)
…a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards’ lives’ ends. (p 189)
The archeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of minds, emotions, older ways of seeing the world. (p 199)
…a brumous pewter light outside, as if someone had stuck tracing paper against the glass. (p 208)
Clouds of linnets bounce, half midges, half musical notation. (p 258)
A lovely word
brumous
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