Book Review: The Lost Words, Robert MacFarlane (author) and Jackie Morris (illustrator)
Poetry: The Lost Words, Robert MacFarlane & Jackie Morris
A hank of rope in the late hot sun; a curl
of bark; a six, an eight:
For adder is as adder basks.
When a recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was released, someone noticed that about forty words from nature had been eliminated, replaced with words from technology. The justification was simple: children are no longer using those words because they are no longer spending time outside. So, words like “adder” and “heather” and “dandelion” no longer matter to children, but words like “blog” and “broadband” and “voicemail” are valuable.
Rather than simply complain, writer Robert MacFarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris decided to try some magic. They wrote a “spell book.” MacFarlane wrote twenty poems using words that were “lost” to the dictionary. Morris then illustrated those poems with lovely paintings that bring the words to life. Their hope is to introduce some of the missing words to a new generation, and hopefully to inspire some of them to go out and enjoy those things for themselves.
The poems are anagrams of the words, so they vary in length. The shortest is “ivy,”
I am ivy, a real high flyer
Via bark and stone I scale tree and spire
You call me ground cover; I say sky-wire.
Kids and adults alike will love the beautiful illustrations, and MacFarlane’s poems do work a spell on the reader. He is a lover of words and the poems show his love and appreciation for language and for the outdoors. Whether the book of spells works its magic on the makers of dictionaries remains to be seen, but it definitely captured this reader’s heart.
This book could be a children’s book, though my library has cataloged it in the adult section. They are also not wrong. Both children and adults will enjoy the whimsical and lyrical poems as well as the lush paintings that accompany them. I am glad that I found The Lost Words.
Also see Book Review: Landmarks, Robert MacFarland