Marian L Thorpe's 3 favorite reads in 2023

“For the beauty that remains in spite of everything.” (p 205.)

Two Lights is James Roberts’ illustrated offering of thanksgiving for both the transience and permanence of the natural world; for the grace of a glimpse of a wolf on a lonely highway; for dusk falling over a river; for the unchanging stars. Written at a time of great personal uncertainty and possible loss, Roberts writes about finding meaning in his relationship with wild things and places.

Two Lights speaks to me; I share Roberts’ experience with finding solace and hope in the natural world; in finding joy even in dark days in the minutiae of nature, the persistence of life in edgelands, the reclaiming of human-ravished places, and in the vastness of geological and astronomical time.

Two Lights is not blinded by optimism; it acknowledges and mourns the destruction of lives both human and not, but asks us—by example, not preaching—to look for the moments that transcend. In the half-lights of dawn and dusk, with earth beneath our feet and the rhythms of walking echoing our heartbeats, barriers dissolve. 

Ness and Holloway make up the two pieces authored or co-authored by Robert MacFarlane – one of my five favourite writers – collected in Ghostways.

Ness, which I believe is meant to be read aloud, is neither quite poetry nor a play. It explores Orford Ness, a shingle spit in Suffolk—a place I know as a birding site and nature reserve, but one that has another deep, layered, secret history. Both disturbing and haunting, there are echoes for me of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

 A holloway is a deeply worn, ancient path, sunken into the landscape. The one that gives the second part of Ghostways its name explores a holloway in Dorset. It’s partly written as a memorial to author Roger Deakin, partly as a personal journey, and a rumination on landscape and meaning. “Stretches of a path might carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path.” MacFarlane writes, and “paths run through people as surely as they run through places….”

My own current work (fiction) in part explores the meaning of memory and place as filtered through grief, and how landscapes shape individuals, sometimes indelibly. MacFarlane (and his co-authors) as always, challenges and inspires me.

I understand Alan Garner’s books not literally, but in my gut.

Arising out of the landscape in which they are set, Treacle Walker tells us a tale of a boy with a lazy eye and a rag-and-bone man whose lives intersect. An exchange of objects is made – a gift for a gift, perhaps, freely given. Sight changes. Time changes. Place changes. How do we separate now from then, real from dreamt, here from there?

Garner writes with brevity and spareness; what is not said matters as much as what is. There is power in language, both in the story and in its creation. As a writer who tries to say much with few words (but rarely succeeds), I’m awed and tested by Garner’s work. I began my professional writing life as a poet, and Garner’s books can be read as prose poetry.

But brevity is misleading: Treacle Walker is not simple, nor definable as to genre – or perhaps even to its meaning. But I find myself thinking about it often.