Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 102
A Nature Book Reader
JIM PERRIN
Jim Perrin is The Guardian’s Country Diarist for Wales
The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau
John Clare’s poems are the
most uncluttered acts of
attention to the natural world
you will ever read; Nan
Shepherd’s exquisite prosemeditation on the Cairngorms
is unique in the literature;
but the book I’d offer as
first choice is Thoreau’s The
Maine Woods. You cannot
not include Thoreau if you’re
to consider nature-writing.
The obvious choice would
have been Walden – a book
I re-visit endlessly, always
with pleasure, new discovery
and appreciation – but its
condensed, apophthegmatic
style is less immediately
accessible than that of The
Maine Woods, a wonderful,
playful book, full of sly, sharp
views of his companions,
races, camp-fires, chance
encounters, short rations,
fish feasts. He evokes the
shifting and imprecise with
102
affective precision, gives us
a clue, a way through into a
more focused state of human
insight and perception. This
is how it is with Thoreau
as you come to know him.
He permeates and refines
your objective awareness in
ways that are subjectively
amplifying and enhancing.
When you move on into his
best work, his observation
of particular landscapes at
crucial points in their history
as man had begun to wreak
grievous change becomes
an entrancement even more
relevant now than in his
own time.
Further Reading
Selected Poems
and Prose by John Clare
The Living Mountain
by Nan Shepherd
