![]() ![]() ![]() Those words form a crooked almost A-to-Z, from “Acorn” through to “Wren” by way of “Bluebell”, “Kingfisher”, “Lark” and “Otter”, among others.įor each word, I wrote a summoning spell-poem to be spoken aloud by the reader, seeking to conjure these common names back into the mouth and the mind’s eye. ![]() The “lost” words of the book’s title are 20 of the names for everyday nature that are slipping from daily speech and knowledge, to the extent that they were dropped from a widely read children’s dictionary due to under-use. The subtitle of The Lost Words is A Spell Book it was our attempt to make what Jackie calls “a beautiful protest” against the depletion of the natural world that is under way quietly and hourly all around us. ![]() But it also thrilled me to be around musicians to whom I’d been listening for years, and to hear them responding to work of mine.įor the Avengers had assembled to develop a project called Spell Songs – a folk-musical adaptation of The Lost Words, by me and the artist Jackie Morris. It didn’t help that I was sleeping in a room that had once been Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s study no pressure for a writer, then. I had something of that shabby curate feeling in the Lakes that weekend. WH Auden once compared being a poet in the company of scientists to being “a shabby curate in a roomful of bishops”. Jackie Morris’s illustration of an egret, for the Spell Songs album. ![]()
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