Shaler's Fish

January 18, 2016
Macdonald, a British historian, naturalist, and illustrator, made waves with her memoir, H Is for Hawk, but in her debut collection of poetry she goes beyond simply observing the natural world, displaying the indefatigable curiosity that motivated the early naturalists who inspire her. Macdonald employs her knowledge of the natural sciences as she deftly works scientific discoveries into poems on such subjects as love, politics, solitude, death, and more. Her imagery encompasses biology, geology, physics, weather patterns, and astronomy. For example, in “Hyperion to a Satellite,” she invokes Widmanstätten patterns found in meteorites: “Widmanstätten’s grating pat, with a formula/ of primitive and suitably drenched olivine. Noble metals// are dropped onto accident blackspots hailing/ from districts of open light, glossing the connectives// with a discriminating solar bombardment.” The rich and heady language calls to mind the tradition of the English Romantic poets while offering wholly new and original constructions: “the shade of your eyes approximates the blade’s blued dorsal edge/ indigent as the model’s side or even air, seen from below// every moment describes some other music/ and I cannot remember banality ever existing.” Devoted readers of H Is for Hawk will find Macdonald’s gift for stunning language, patient curiosity, and expansive wisdom on full display in her poems.

February 15, 2016

Originally published in the UK in 1997, this collection from the author of the award-winning H Is for Hawk will surprise readers with its intensity and the diversity of its language and imagery. Dense and often difficult, these poems are rooted in the natural world even as they address love and the human condition. Macdonald's syntax is often broken with nonlinear turns, and she typically uses archaic language and spellings with little or no punctuation, relying on her mastery of line and stanza breaks to lead readers to a semblance of sense. What stands out is her use of assonance and internal rhymes, language that is richly lovely and lyrical: "Clinker, clink clink/ binoculars trained on Maeterlink, the/ headland, the bobolink and the lyre// of great light." VERDICT "My pen crumples into a swan, it is singing/ inauthenticate myth, and not of future splendour...," says one poem, and in the first poem, "Taxonomy," a wren sings fully with no "subsong," that is, an unstructured, often rambling, and low-volumed melody. Perhaps that's the key; these poems are fully drawn but murmuring with a subsong of their own. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/15.]--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2015

Macdonald claimed the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year Award, not to mention New York Times best seller status, for H Is for Hawk, a meditation on her exorcising grief by training a fierce goshawk named Mabel. Before all that glorious fame, she was a poet, and this first book has never been published in America. Not surprisingly, it probes the natural as well as the human world in vibrant verse. With a 12-city tour.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.