From Robert Macfarlane, the acclaimed author of The Old Ways and
Underland--a celebration of the language of landscape and the power of
words to shape our sense of place
For years now, the British writer Robert Macfarlane has been collecting
place-words: terms for aspects of landscape, nature, and weather, drawn
from dozens of languages and dialects of the British Isles. In this, his
fifth book, Macfarlane brilliantly explores the linguistic and literary
terrain of the British archipelago, from the Shetlands to Cornwall and
from Cumbria to Suffolk, offering themed glossaries of hundreds of these
rare, deeply local, poetical terms, organized by such geographical
terrains as flatlands, uplands, waterlands, coastlands, woodlands, and
underlands. Interspersed with this archive of place words are
biographical essays in which Macfarlane writes of his favorite authors
who have paid close attention to the natural world and who embody in
their own work the huge richness of place language--from Barry Lopez and
John Muir to Nan Shepard, J. A. Baker, and Roger Deakin. Landmarks is
a book about the power of language and how it can become a way to know
and love landscape, from a writer acclaimed for his own precision of
utterance and distinctive, lyrical voice.
