TY - JOUR AU - John, Stefanie AB - Abstract This essay examines the use of poetic prose in recent non-fiction by Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie. Drawing on selected chapters from Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Jamie’s Sightlines (2012), and a prose poem from Jamie’s The Bonniest Companie (2015), it demonstrates the hybridity of contemporary nature writing by paying attention to the works’ transgressions of the bounds of verse and prose. After introducing the nineteenth-century debate on differences between lyric and prosaic language and outlining Romantic efforts to poeticize prose descriptions of nature and environment, the article discusses Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s role in this conversation. I argue that formal transgressions – evident in metrical and rhyming effects, typographical experiments, imagery, and allusion – are especially strong in passages that describe movement: in accounts of walking or in observations of the shifting motions of light and weather. Prose forms that approximate and integrate lyricism here enhance a sense of transience as well as exhibit the continuity of human and non-human worlds. Self-consciously tracing the footsteps of other poets who have traversed genre boundaries, Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s work establishes nature writing as a form that is persistently on the move. Charles Baudelaire’s dedication to Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose (1869) introduced the prose poem as a form defined by its protean ability to move between genres and adapt to its environment. ‘Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamt the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flops of consciousness’.1 Baudelaire’s experiments with ‘poems in prose’ were shaped to the restlessness of modern city life: ‘Above all, it’s from being in crowded towns, from the criss-cross of their innumerable ways, that this obsessive ideal is born’.2 In London, the prose poem was taken up by decadents such as Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson, while poetic styles characterized the art criticism of Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Modernists such as Virginia Woolf similarly discovered forms of poetic prose to negotiate the acceleration of everyday life. Beyond the confines of the city, nineteenth-century prose about the natural world veered towards the lyrical as well. Topographical writing from William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, to the novels of Thomas Hardy developed their own take on the ‘miracle of a poetic prose’ that is ‘musical without rhythm or rhyme’. These writers found in poetic prose a means of expressing the ‘undulations of reverie’ inspired by the natural world and thus helped to shape the tradition out of which contemporary British nature writing was born. In the twenty-first century, Baudelaire’s vision of flexible forms remains integral to descriptions of topographical and ecological minutiae in non-fictional prose works which reflect critically on relationships between nature and culture and man-made environmental change. Hailed as a movement in a special issue of Granta magazine in 2008, the so-called ‘new nature writing’ has made hybridity and formal mobility essential to its tentative status as a genre. Non-fictional prose by contemporary British and Irish authors such as Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Tim Dee, Richard Mabey, Helen Macdonald, Amy Liptrot, Melissa Harrison, and Olivia Laing thrives on its versatility. Surveying the proliferation of works in this mode since the turn of the century, Joe Moran observes that they ‘tend to be thematically wide-ranging and stylistically digressive, combining personal reflection with natural history, cultural history, psychogeography, travel and topographical writing, folklore and prose poetry, which makes them correspondingly difficult to categorise’ and which renders ‘nature writing’ a provisional label at best.3 The success of these books is certainly linked to public concerns with conservation and the global environmental crisis. But it may also, in part, be a matter of style. Much of the best recent exemplars of the form compellingly join autobiographical narration with factual knowledge and literariness. The prose of Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie, for instance, incorporates information on subjects comprising ecology, geography, geology, archaeology, and history while experimenting with artful metaphors, rhythms, rhymes, and typographical patterns in its accounts of landscape, weather, and natural history. A supposed tendency towards ‘purple’ passages has sometimes fed into critiques of contemporary nature writing. Mark Cocker complains that ‘[i]n Macfarlane’s work and in so many of the new books, nature and culture have been replaced by landscape and literature’, so that ‘fine writing’ risks shifting nature ‘to the background as an attractive green wash’ instead of highlighting the realities of environmental change.4 But ‘fine writing’ and the use of hybrid forms also enables nature writers to engage with the realities of topographical and meteorological phenomena in a manner that is nuanced, attentive to detail, and sensitive to the contradictions that inform human relationships with the natural world. Rather than rehashing the old debate of how political nature writing can or should be, the present essay examines how exactly form is put to use in Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), Jamie’s Sightlines (2012), and her prose poem ‘Soledades’ (2015). Analysing their use of imagery, metre, rhymes, and other devices in passages of heightened subjective reflection, I argue, firstly, that Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s prose prominently verges towards the lyrical in evocations of movement and mutability. Mobility and change inform the descriptions of walks and boat trips, meditations on transformed natural habitats, and narratives of personal development that structure recent nature writing.5 In Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s works, states of flux are realized by way of formal flexibility: testing out the boundaries between prose and poetry, their writing gestures towards environmental instability as well as demarcating the subjectivity of perception that shapes encounters with nature and place. Secondly, I demonstrate that allusions to and quotations from other writers are integral to Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s movements between forms. Such dialogues allow them, for instance, to elaborate on and creatively rewrite individual images and to expand the rhythms of their own prose. Instead of asking, as typically done, how twenty-first-century nature writing reworks and subverts pastoral and romantic clichés, I start out from the observation that the genre constitutes itself intertextually and aesthetically.6 In John Elder’s words: Authors within the lineage often address each other directly, as well as emulate each other's postures, personas, and excursions. Nature writing is a sort of ongoing experiment, an investigation of how imaginative literature and close observation of natural phenomena can be integrated.7 Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s works constitute such an ‘ongoing experiment’ as it explores the limits and possibilities of the poetic and the prosaic. Macfarlane, in The Old Ways, apprehends the outdoors through the contrary impulses of ‘roaming and homing’ and through a conversation with poet-pedestrians who have transgressed genre boundaries, from Wordsworth to Edward Thomas. Here the rhythms of walking sustain the rhythms of a poetic prose. Jamie’s essays and prose poems in Sightlines and The Bonniest Companie approximate the changeability of the clouds, light, and landscapes they describe. Her writing deftly mediates between the spaciousness of prose syntax and paragraph and the condensed pattern of the lyric line and stanza, just as its narrator moves from the remote landscapes of the Arctic back to the domestic space of the garden. Discussing Jamie after Macfarlane, my readings travel from expansive ‘epic’ to shorter ‘lyric’ modes of poetic prose, culminating in Jamie’s prose poem ‘Soledades’. Nature Writing as Poetic Prose Form has, by now, received considerable attention in studies of contemporary environmental writing, especially poetry.8 But there has been little explicit interest in the lyrical affinities of the brand of prose works popularized by Macfarlane and Jamie’s generation. Critics mostly treat these formal transgressions as features of the essay. Simone Schröder, for example, argues that ‘nature essays’ since the early nineteenth century ‘depend on the genre’s capacity to adopt empirical descriptions, but it should not be overlooked that they also give nature topics a poetic and rhetorical treatment that may interfere with their responsibility to factualities’.9 Jos Smith likewise notes the parallels between lyric and the essay form used by writers such as Deakin, Macfarlane, Jamie, or Dee: if ‘[t]he lyric makes its own truth at the same time as it reads and represents the given world’, then ‘[t]here is a parallel … between the essay as a lyric form and the understanding of place as a creative process of inhabitation’.10 Smith’s study, focusing on ‘the literature of place’, is thematically rather than formally organized, while Schröder’s exclusively deals with the nature essay, which she distinguishes from the diary, the travel report, and the memoir.11 While these critics gesture towards nature writing’s self-conscious adoption of literary conventions, they do not make reference to the prose poem, a form that has recently been revalued in works such as Jane Monson’s British Prose Poems: The Poems without Lines (2018) and Jeremy Noel-Tod’s Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018).12 What distinguishes the prose poem from other poetry is that ‘the sentence is used as a unit, rather than the line’.13 ‘Unchecked by metre or rhyme’, in Noel-Tod’s words, ‘prose poetry flows by soft return from margin to margin, filling the empty field of the page’.14 In that sense, the prose poem entertains a close relationship with ‘poetic prose’, a term usually applied to passages in novels or non-fictional writings, which have ‘a markedly high proportion of rhythm and other features associated with poetry’.15 Both concepts exemplify that the boundaries between poetic and prosaic language are fluid rather than fixed, and both are productive in discussing Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s non-fiction.16 This versatility was addressed by writers prior to the late Victorian pioneers of the prose poem. Intersections between the prosaic and the lyrical fascinated Romantic poets: ‘[i]t may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition’, Wordsworth contends in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: ‘They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree.’17 Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a similar vein, remarks that ‘[t]he distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error’: ‘The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a whole being a poem.’18 Wordsworth’s description of ‘organs’ and ‘bodies’ in which prose and poetry are ‘clothed’ is telling; his imagery implies not only that poetry and prose are created of the same matter or ‘substance’ but, by oddly reversing the idea of clothes being put on bodies, also seems to challenge the notion that linguistic elements can be deliberately arranged to form a certain style and be changed, like garments, according to purpose. Something more profound seems to be at stake at the encounter of verse and prose, a sense that language has a life and will of its own, which adapts to its environments in unpredictable ways. Wordsworth exemplified these motions in his own prose. His Guide to the Lakes, first published in 1810, not only fostered a touristic interest in the landscapes of the Lake District but also emphasized the interrelations of human and non-human habitats in a language that is both visionary and minutely descriptive. It has been characterized by Stephen Gill as ‘a guide, but … also a prose-poem about light, shapes, and textures, about movement and stillness’.19 Wordsworth’s account of the weather conditions in the Lakes, for example, shifts from neutral observation to sensory spectacle: ‘Days of unsettled weather, with partial showers, are very frequent; but the showers, darkening or brightening, as they fly from hill to hill, are not less grateful to the eye than finely interwoven passages of gay and sad music are touching to the ear.’20 Rhyming echoes and parallel structures, in ‘darkening’ and ‘brightening’, ‘hill to hill’, ‘days’ and ‘gay’, give rhythmical effect to the syntax, as Wordsworth’s language creates ‘finely interwoven passages’ of prose. His attentiveness to the particularities of landscapes and the aesthetic potential inherent in the natural world pioneered the genre of non-fictional nature writing, even as later versions tried to sidestep Romantic influence. Contemporary nature writing, in its bid to shake off the nostalgic associations of either a ‘reactionary ruralism’ or ‘sentimentalism for a prelapsarian age of at-one-with-natureness’, as Macfarlane has put it, displays a conflicted relationship with this Romantic inheritance, as evident in the unease surrounding the label ‘nature writing’ itself.21 On the one hand, modernizing the genre, in the inaugural terms used by editor Jason Cowley in the Granta issue on ‘new nature writing’, meant moving away from ‘the lyrical pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer’ and embracing the notion of nature writing as ‘something urgent, vital and alert to the defining particulars of our time’.22 On the other hand, the styles employed by Macfarlane, Jamie, and their contemporaries allow for the abundance of poetical parts in prose compositions, in Shelley’s terms, in similar ways as their nineteenth- and twentieth-century precursors. Even as their writing positions itself against embellished depictions of sublime nature and unspoiled territories, it does not cease to be lyrically refined, rich with imagery and musical syntax. When contemporary nature writers employ ‘hybrid or generically ambiguous literary forms that encompass (and interleave) both experiential and cultural accounts of place’, they work within, rather than supersede, a rich tradition of writing that has inhabited the space between prose and poetry.23 Each author develops an individual version of this relationship. Jamie’s critique of Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2007) in a review entitled ‘The Lone Enraptured Male’ has served as a cue for critics to pit Jamie’s focus on the landscapes and ancient histories of Scotland as well as her interest in domestic life against Macfarlane’s explorations of ‘wild places’ from an English, masculine and, arguably, more Romantic point of view.24 Macfarlane’s accounts of his travels also tend to be more heavily interspersed with digressions on natural history and other background material – The Old Ways includes footnotes and a glossary – whereas Jamie records her experiences in a more conversational manner that stays wary of the sublime. ‘Where Macfarlane’s narrative persona is earnest, impassioned, and evidently knowledgeable, Jamie’s is more consistently ironic and self-questioning, adopting the role of the curious amateur rather than that of the expert-guide or adventurer’, notes Neal Alexander, who still stresses the two writers’ ‘deeper affinities’.25 When it comes to lyric craft, Jamie is evidently a more ‘knowledgeable’ practitioner than Macfarlane. But both writers allow lyrical eloquence to emerge through prosaic attentiveness. In The Old Ways and Sightlines, these transgressions are especially strong in passages that describe movement – in accounts of walking or other ways of traversing land or in observations of the shifting motions of light and weather. A prose form that integrates lyricism here conveys a sense of transience as well as exhibiting the continuity of human and non-human worlds. Instead of confirming T. S. Eliot’s verdict in ‘The Boundaries of Prose’ that confusing poetry with prose, and vice versa, diminishes artistic achievement, the aesthetic potential of Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s writing inheres in its formal flexibility and its penchant for allusion.26 Echoes and Traces: Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Robert Macfarlane thinks of his work as less concerned with ‘nature’ than with terms such as ‘landscape’ and ‘topography’.27 Shifting attention away from these thematic labels and onto the level of form, I contend that in The Old Ways, reflections on place, walking, and writing become alive through ‘poeticizing’ techniques. My analysis, thus, takes a different turn than Daniel Weston’s, who ventures that ‘it is perhaps narrative that is the single most significant feature’ in Macfarlane’s engagement with nature and place.28 Instead, I expand John Carey’s account of The Old Ways in a review, as ‘a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems’.29 Walking is the key theme of The Old Ways. In four parts, the book follows Macfarlane across England, Scotland, Palestine, Spain, and Tibet. In contrast to The Wild Places (2007), which often portrayed Macfarlane as a solitary wanderer in search for remnants of untouched ‘wilderness’ in the British Isles (only to realize, in the course of the narrative, that such a notion obliterates the human impact on these landscapes), The Old Ways makes a point of communal walking, of the people and histories associated with the paths sought out by Macfarlane. The book tracks a core motif of departure and return, revolving around the fundamental human urges to dwell and to be on the move: ‘that tension between roaming and homing’.30 Walking becomes not only a means of connecting with a place, its people, and history but also a quest for the appropriate language for a landscape. Descriptions of locations are shot through with references to other writers from Rousseau, Wordsworth, Clare, Emerson, and Whitman to Edward Thomas and Nan Sheperd. Macfarlane follows in the footsteps of a whole tradition of ‘perambulatory writing’ in British literature, as John Mullan calls it, where ‘[t]o ruminate poetically and to walk became synonymous’.31 In Macfarlane’s own words, ‘[t]he compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature – a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells’ (OW p. 18, emphasis in original). Walking does not merely instigate storytelling. In step with poetry, it evokes rhythms and patterns and inspires imaginative thinking. ‘Path’, the second chapter of The Old Ways, addresses these connections. Like every chapter in the book, ‘Path’ is prefaced by a list of key terms and images, which serve as epigraph and map of contents at the same time. Phrases are set off from one another by way of dashes to form a grid-like pattern, illustrating interconnection and enhancing the notion of paths as sign systems. Arranged in a single eight-line paragraph, the list recalls the compact shape of a prose poem: ‘Foil – Trods & holloways – The blue & lucid ice – Utsi’s Stone – A labyrinth of liberty – Consensual making –’ (OW, p. 11). Assonantal and alliterative effects connect seemingly disparate fragments of thought while also introducing Macfarlane’s allusive method. The words ‘foil’ and ‘trod’ appear in similar proximity in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877), a poem that imagines the natural world as ‘charged’ with the brightness of divine power: ‘It will flame out, like shining from shook foil’.32 Hopkins replicates the rhythms of walking in an iambic line, which contrasts the dullness of human endeavour with the shining ‘greatness’ (l. 3) of nature: ‘Generations have trod, have trod, have trod’ (l. 5). Macfarlane, too, addresses human relationships towards the environment. His use of the word ‘foil’ refers to the language of hunting, where ‘a creature’s "foil" is its track’ (OW, p. 13). Yet while Hopkins’s proto-ecopoetic vision moves from bleakness to optimism about the resilience of a divine nature against the destructiveness of ‘man’s smudge’ (l. 7), Macfarlane sees nature and human culture as intractably bound up from the start: the epigraph-list to ‘Path’ finds aesthetic appeal not only in ‘blue & lucid ice’ but also in ‘The pylon’s lyric crackle’. The latter image echoes the three-stress pattern of the former as well as catching its play on ‘l’-sounds, heralding the ‘lyric’ character of Macfarlane’s prose. Enumeration recurs as a means of rendering the act of walking into literature. Macfarlane contemplates how ‘we leave tracks as we walk’ as acts of ‘mark-making’ (OW, p. 13) and invites his readers to imagine landscapes as webs of overlapping paths, as patterns of signifiers whose aesthetic potential inheres as much in the images they conjure as in their phonological realization: Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets – say the names of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite – holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths. (OW, p. 13) Envisioning landscape as language and language as landscape, the passage relishes in the precise denominations of different kinds of paths. Acoustic relations come to the fore in alliteration and assonance, off-rhymes (‘cartways, carneys, causeways’), and in the repeated stress of initial syllables. By accentuating language’s physical dimension, Macfarlane points towards the key challenge of all topographical literature: to convey a sense of material space on the two-dimensional page and to evoke the immediate joy of traversing and experiencing these places to the reader who encounters them ‘after the fact’. As a consequence, Macfarlane presents his ‘perambulatory writing’ as moving in space as well as time. Paths constitute a gateway to the past by suggesting ‘the histories of a route and its previous followers’ (OW, p. 15). This function is manifest in Macfarlane’s allusion to a line from John Clare’s poem ‘Rural Scenes’, where Clare notes about field paths: ‘They give me joy as I proceed’. ‘Me too’ concedes Macfarlane (OW, p. 16). The ‘exchange’ with Clare testifies to Macfarlane’s conversation with a lineage of poet-walkers, while also illustrating the ambition to achieve immediacy in his own topographical aesthetic. Clare’s lively tetrameter animates Macfarlane’s prose, while the use of the present tense and emphasis on ‘proceed’ direct attention to the momentary and dynamic experience of walking. Macfarlane’s walks add new layers of ‘mark-making’ (OW, p. 13) to the old ways as they illuminate the traces left by others. Towards the end of the chapter, Macfarlane contemplates how following a physical path may lead to the resolution of a rational problem. Again, he resorts to earlier writers to substantiate these ideas. The words of three poets are folded into one another in a paragraph that reflects on the use of water imagery to illustrate the origins of knowledge. Macfarlane first quotes the contemporary poet Thomas A. Clark, who describes descending steps on a sea shore as the transition into ‘another knowledge/wild and cold’ (quoted in OW, p. 30). Here Macfarlane detects an allusion to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘At the Fishhouses’, which envisions water ‘like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’ (quoted in OW, p. 30). Bishop, in turn, ‘casts backwards … to Wordsworth in 1815 writing of how one accesses the “depths of reason”’ (OW, p. 30). In the ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’, Macfarlane highlights Wordsworth’s image of ‘steps of thought’, which the mind treads to access these hidden ‘depths’. Clark’s, Bishop’s, and Wordsworth’s lines ‘become restatements of each other – a print-trail or series of steps of their own’ (OW, p. 30). In line with the downward movement into the water and into knowledge, Macfarlane’s search for intertextual traces proceeds from the twenty-first to the nineteenth century. By realigning the three poets’ work, his writing also contributes a fresh perspective to their ‘series of steps’. Echoing one another’s ‘steps’ and ‘depths’, Clark’s, Bishop’s, Wordsworth’s, and Macfarlane’s voices blend into a collage of poetic prose. Macfarlane’s writing tilts most notably towards the lyrical when it evokes the narrator’s own movement and subjective impressions. The most striking route described in The Old Ways is the Broomway, an offshore footpath across the Maplin Sands in Essex, marked by broomstick-like poles. It is introduced in the chapter ‘Silt’ as ‘allegedly “the deadliest” path in Britain and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked’ (OW, p. 59–60). Macfarlane’s account of the scenery and the eerie experience of treading a path that seems absent and present at the same time, as it is covered in water and only accessible at low tide, shifts between travel report and poetic prose. The opening paragraph, set off from the body of the chapter, asks to be read both as a self-contained piece and as a preface. It describes the tidal landscape on the track of the Broomway in a manner that is lucid and imaginatively charged: Half a mile offshore, walking on silver water, we crossed a path that extended gracefully and without apparent end to our north and south. It was a shallow tidal channel and the water it held caught and pooled the sun, such that its route existed principally as flux; a phenomenon of light and currents. Its bright line curved away from us: an ogee whose origin we could not explain and whose invitation to follow we could not disobey, so we walked it northwards, along that glowing track made neither of water nor of land, which led us further and still further out to sea. (OW, p. 59) Anticipating Macfarlane’s account of his preparation, near-cancellation, and eventual accomplishment of the walk in the company of his friend David Quentin, the image of ‘walking on silver water’ heightens the curious, illusory sense of place associated with the Broomway. Surface reflections enhance a feeling of dislocation, of being guided onto ‘glowing track[s]’ unknown to the common maps. The territory between water and land invites Macfarlane’s narrator-self to melt into the environment. It lures the walkers ‘further and still further out to sea’ in a subclause that employs repetitions and hexameter-like stresses to underscore infinite continuation. The illusory ‘path’ created by the tidal channel also blurs distinctions between water and light and between stillness and movement. Existing ‘principally as flux’, the water path mirrors the compulsion to be on the move, the core theme of The Old Ways. Its ghostliness and simultaneous aesthetic appeal invites us to accept the elusive otherness of the waterscape while also cherishing its beauty. The passage also draws attention to its own form. Macfarlane compares the ‘curved’ form of the path to an ogee, a shape first described by William Hogarth in 1753 as the ‘line of beauty’ (OW, p. 73), which features prominently in gothic architecture. On the mudflats, however, these forms come into being in a realm beyond human control: the channel’s ‘bright line curved away from us’. Macfarlane’s poetic prose takes care not to freeze landscapes in artistic frames but, in a language that itself crosses boundaries, emphasizes their volatility and mysteriousness. Macfarlane returns to the ‘ogee’ form and the sense of continuity it imparts when, later on in the chapter, he describes the ‘miniature sandscapes of ridge and valley’ (OW, p. 73) that constitute the mudflats. Locating a striking regularity, he finds ‘the ripple line of the ridges … recapitulated wherever I looked: in small bivalves between whose parted shells poked frilled lips, and in serpentine channels’ (OW, p. 73). Once more, Macfarlane’s language is sensitive to poetic effect, as it adopts the sounds of ‘ripple line’ in the play of consonance and off-rhymes, which links ‘shells’, ‘frilled’, and ‘lips’. If Macfarlane’s description of these shapes by way of the ogee imposes cultural forms onto nature, the passage also reverses this move as it discerns in these organic shapes a model for poetry. Macfarlane memorizes the physical experience of the walk in the same way as a line of poetry or song would resonate: ‘for days after the walk’, he feels ‘a memory of that pressure and pattern’ (OW, p. 73) evoked by walking across the lines in the sand. Like the metrical patterns of verse, the landscape’s regular design impresses itself on the mind. Rachel Joyce describes Macfarlane’s topographical writing as ‘a journey inwards’: thus, The Old Ways illustrates ‘the ways in which we are shaped by the landscape through which we move’.33 Macfarlane certainly highlights the soothing or exhilarating effects walking has on the mind, as when, out in the mudflats, ‘[t]he serenity of the space through which we were moving calmed me to the point of invulnerability’ (OW, p. 80). Elsewhere, he speaks of his fascination with ‘topographies of self we carry within us’, the process of ‘how people understand themselves using landscape’ (OW, p. 26). Yet in equal measure, The Old Ways outlines a journey outwards, away from the self into the material history of the ancient paths and into fields of knowledge that exceed the subjective realm. This approach entails scientific elaborations, which often serve as a source of aesthetic effect, too – Macfarlane develops a ‘poetics of facts’, as Anneke Lubkowitz notes.34 At one point, Macfarlane provides a paragraph-long list of surface rock names, 130 varieties of which can, apparently, be found in England and Wales. The sheer oddness of these terms is both ‘epic’ and non-sensical, ‘a Jabberwocky sprawl’ (OW, p. 38). During a trip to Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, Macfarlane moves from the history of ‘sea roads’ since prehistoric times to the techniques of navigation, turning technicalities into catchy lyrics: ‘The instruction rounded into a couplet – Sail on up by the old North Star; hold it steady between halyard and spar’ (OW, p. 133, emphasis in original).35 Poetic effects here serve to comprehend systems beyond identity-construction as the writing implies the immense scale of relations that form ecosystems and the intricate nexus of knowledge humans have developed to grasp them. Macfarlane exemplifies nature writing’s ‘ability to be microscopic and macroscopic within one piece of writing’.36 Macfarlane’s engagement with his precursors, in particular the works of Edward Thomas, forms part of his outward movement. Macfarlane retraces the routes in the south of England, which Thomas described in The Icknield Way (1913), and, at the end of the book, delves into a biographical narrative that imagines Thomas’s final days as a soldier at the front in France, where he was killed in 1917. Thomas exemplifies the urge to combine wandering with writing. He also crossed formal boundaries: Macfarlane quotes Robert Frost, who recognized in his friend ‘a poet behind the disguise of prose’ (OW, p. 342) and eventually inspired Thomas to take up verse. The chapter ‘Flint’ returns to the chalk tracks in Thomas’s home territory of the South Downs, where The Old Ways started out. ‘Thomas loved the historical synchronicities of the chalk: the ancient path-lines that were echoed in form by yesterday’s plough furrows’ (OW, p. 309). Macfarlane’s own work now echoes the ‘path-lines’ of Thomas’s writing. The image of ‘plough furrows’, for example, nods to Thomas’s visions of rural life. In the poem ‘As the team’s head brass’ (1916), Thomas’s speaker observes a plough’s rhythmic movements across a field, ‘narrowing a yellow square / Of charlock’, whereupon a conversation about the war unfolds.37 Notwithstanding such ‘synchronicities’, the contemporary nature writer can never, finally, quite catch up with the precursor. To Macfarlane, Thomas remains ‘enigmatic’: ‘I had set out to come to know Thomas by walking where he had walked, but he had mostly eluded me’ (OW, p. 326). The comment demarcates a historical divide while also hinting at the challenge of creating a new literature of place that can compete with the canon. As if to prove the opposite, such moments of self-reflection alternate with passages that demonstrate Macfarlane’s own poetic sensitivity. After Macfarlane singles out Thomas’s ability to conjure ‘the present-tenseness of nature’ (OW, p. 324), he turns back to the here and now of his own narration – he has reached a plateau near Kingston on the South Downs: Above me, swifts hunted the dusk air over the scarp slope. They turned so sharply and smoothly and at such speed that it seemed the air must be honeycombed with transparent tubes down which the swifts were sliding, for surely nothing else could account for the compressed control of their turns. Their flight-paths lent contour to the sky and their routes outlined the berms and valleys of wind which formed and re-formed at that height, so that the air appeared to possess a topology of its own, made visible by the birds’ motion. (OW, pp. 326–27) Seeing the air as a space charted and outlined by the swifts who slide through ‘transparent tubes’ exemplifies Macfarlane’s knack for constructing unusual metaphors. As the swifts gather speed, the writing performs the same act of concretization as the birds: where repeated consonants add a material dimension to the air’s transparency, images of tubes and flight paths provide ‘contour’. Once again, Macfarlane’s prose assumes its most lyric guise in envisioning movement, in this case, of the birds in flight. Movement may serve to enhance ‘landscape’s instabilities’ (OW, p. 325), the notion that places and our conceptions of nature are elusive, flexible phenomena rather than fixed entities. These moments bring to the fore what Stephen Hunt terms ‘psychoecology’ – a writing that concerns itself with relations between the environment and the human mind’s perception of it and which displays ‘an acute awareness of the agency of the writer in constructing as well as describing the natural world (and indeed our environment’s role in constructing us)’.38 To Macfarlane, this approach also involves mediating his engagement with nature through allusions, as when he introduces Thomas as a pioneer of literary walking or when he filters and collates Wordsworth and Bishop through his own work. His poetic prose appeals to us to see beauty in our environment but also cautions that neither nature nor nature writing be treated as untrodden territory. Lyric Expansions in Kathleen Jamie’s Prose Kathleen Jamie once observed that her essays in Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) ‘are more related to poetry than they are to fiction. They’re not prose poems, but they’re more affiliated to poetry’.39 Chapter titles in these volumes, indeed, resemble those of Jamie’s poems, indicating particular places or natural phenomena. Titles in Sightlines include, for example, ‘Aurora’, ‘The Gannetry’, ‘Light’, ‘Wind’, or the allusive ‘Three Ways of Looking at St Kilda’. The intimacy between poetic and prose forms in Jamie’s work has often been linked to her talent at ‘noticing’ and paying minute attention to her environment. A strong ‘sensitivity of perception’, says Deborah Lilley, defines Jamie’s writing.40 Schröder points out her ‘grounded, unagitated voice’,41 while Eleanor Bell notes the ways in which her descriptions of natural and urban territories bring together the ordinary and the transcendent: ‘in Jamie’s work it is not uncommon for the profound to interconnect with the mundane, for the poetic to be interspersed with the domestic’.42 As a consequence, in both Jamie’s poems and prose, ‘it is not unusual for moments of potential transcendence … to come down to earth with a realist bump’.43 Jamie’s accounts of movement and mutability constitute a further structuring element of her prose. They contain its most lyrically imaginative moments, as I demonstrate in sections from Sightlines and a prose poem from The Bonniest Companie. Jamie’s writing, like Macfarlane’s, is pervaded by the voices of others – those of fellow poets and travel companions. As it meanders between the lyrical and the prosaic, Jamie’s writing displays an environmental vision as versatile and hybrid as the boundaries between culture and nature. Critics have emphasized Jamie’s ‘characteristically spare prose style’ and her ‘aesthetics of reticence’, often by contrasting her work with the expansive narrative arches of Macfarlane’s books.44 But Jamie’s ‘reticence’ should not be equated with a lack of linguistic artistry or hostility to beautiful language. Her prose is packed with rhymes and metrical effects, carefully designed tropes, and allusions. These effects enhance her sense of the tentativeness and fragility of human–nature relations. In ‘Aurora’, Jamie travels along the southern coast of Greenland. On the ship, she meets a woman called Polly, whose remark, upon witnessing the aurora borealis, frames the chapter: ‘They are changing without moving’.45 Brief dialogues often lend structure to Jamie’s descriptions. It is characteristic of her self-effacing narrative method that she does not absorb the phrase into her own voice but acknowledges its source. Relations of change and movement, and the possibility of transformation through stillness, inform Jamie’s descriptions of the northern lights’ fluctuating appearance. Its green glow and luminous shapes convey ‘restlessness’: they ‘shift and alter’ in motions that seem like ‘fluidity of mind; an intellectualism’ (S, p. 12). There is movement, but it lacks the stark physicality of other natural elements, suggesting interior processes rather than materially visible change. Mirroring the light’s alterations, Jamie’s prose contracts and expands, as the paragraph meanders around qualities of green – ‘[l]uminous green, teal green’, ‘an emerald veil’ (S, p. 12), a ‘green restlessness’ (S, p. 14) – and the language ‘glows’ and ‘intensifies’ (S, p. 12) in its vision. Jamie extends the conceit of nature as an intellectual or scientific endeavour by envisioning the aurora in terms of a perpetual ‘redrafting and recalculating’, something that is ‘less like a natural phenomenon, more like a feat of technology’ (S, p. 12). Rhymes structure the syntax: ‘because the aurora’s green is exactly the same glowing green as the ship’s radar screen’ (S, p. 12). By testing out cadences and similes, Jamie’s language captures the tentative, calculating appearance of the northern lights. Contemplating change without movement eventually leads Jamie’s narrator to consider the most severe expression of mutability on a global scale – climate change: I float on the surface of knowledge, too. Of climate science, for example …. In 2003, a team who’d spent seven years drilling through the Greenland ice to fetch up core samples at last hit bedrock. The ice at bottom of the core is 20,000 years old. They were bringing the deep past out of its silence, waking it up to ask it about change …. I sail on the surface of understanding, a flicker here, a silence there. (S, p. 17) Pairing ‘a silence’ with ‘a flicker’ to express the difficulty of comprehending the immense scale of human impact on the natural world, the passage also echoes Jamie’s reflections on the aurora as sublime wonder and scientifically explicable occurrence. The theme of change, inspired by the shape-shifting lights, itself assumes new forms throughout the chapter, just as the prose oscillates between factual evidence and poetic contemplation. A careful assemblage of wording and sounds illustrates Jamie’s idea of the writing process as a craft: I will change a sentence to alter the assonance and consonance, the same way I would with a line in poems, and I will play with the grammar, do quick handbrake turns with the subject, or put in a two-word sentence to pull it up sharp. My great analogy is that they’re like exploded diagrams. Do you know what an exploded diagram is in a car maintenance manual? No? You haven’t spent much time with car maintenance manuals.46 In typically dry manner, Jamie draws her analogy from the mundane world of car mechanics. The exploded diagram here suggests an understanding of the text as a whole, an entity formed of minute parts. It is artificially constructed rather than organically grown, yet still depends on the harmonious interrelations of its constituent elements. In ‘Aurora’, the images of vision and silence, of mobility and change, act as connecting threads between sentences and paragraphs. These anchoring devices return in the chapter’s conclusion, which captures both a sense of unease and eerie beauty conveyed by the arctic landscape. After snow has fallen and the northern lights have vanished, the icebergs surrounding the ship appear ‘much more sinister’: Each, in its weird majesty, slips alongside, lit white by the ship’s lights, only to fall behind into darkness, into the ship’s wake, reducing and reducing till it’s nothing but a gleam, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. I bear it as long as I can, then go back inside to the warm. (S, p. 19) The intensity of assonance and rhymes linking ‘slips’, ‘lit’, and ‘ship’, as well as ‘side’, ‘white’, ‘lights’, and ‘behind’, steadily disperses as the sentence, and the chapter comes to a close, mirroring the ‘reducing’ effect towards ‘nothing but a gleam’. The final sentence exemplifies what Bell calls the ‘realist bump’, which typically follows Jamie’s evocations of natural beauty. Her narrator’s sense of being able to ‘bear’ nature’s beauty and intensity, too, implies a knowing distance towards attitudes of naive exultation. Despite its change in tone, the paragraph maintains a carefully conceived rhythm – as in a prose poem, ‘the sentence is used as a unit, rather than the line’.47 Jamie’s concluding sentence employs exactly eight syllables in both clauses, divided evenly by the comma after ‘can’. It offers the essay’s final ‘gleam’ of lyrical nuance. ‘[O]ur habitual expectation when we see a passage of prose is that it will explain, not sing’, ventures Noel-Tod.48 Jamie’s musicality and sharpness of vision repeatedly confounds these assumptions. ‘Light’ from Sightlines further probes the limits of form. The shortest chapter in the volume – it comprises only four paragraphs over two pages – ‘Light’ comes close to a prose poem proper. It also departs from the travel narrative of other chapters, proceeding, instead, almost like the ‘greater Romantic lyric’ described by M. H. Abrams, which performs an ‘out-in-out process in which the mind confronts nature and their interplay constitutes the poem’.49 ‘Light’ starts out from specific, subjective perceptions in the narrator’s immediate environment and moves towards the contemplation of more complex aspects of human existence. Again, the subjects are light and weather, but the scene is more mundane than in ‘Aurora’, set in a house and garden. Ruminating on the quality of light in February and the transition from winter to early spring, Jamie charges the minute observations of her surroundings with universal relevance: Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky. Today, a Sunday, is such a day, though the trees are still stark and without leaves; the grasses are dry and winter-beaten. (S, p. 91) This scene could be anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Jamie’s voice, however, adds individuality to the descriptions, as the essay gradually becomes more personal. Alterations of light metaphorically capture the process of maturation: descriptions of light and weather are paired with the narrator’s thoughts about her children’s impending transition from childhood to puberty. Movement and change provide rhythmical organization at the same time that they act as thematic focal points: ‘both sunlight and wind arrive together out of the same airt, an invasion of light and air out of a sky of quickly moving clouds, working together as a swift team’ (S, p. 91). Jamie’s use of the Scots word ‘airt’ stands out, which can mean ‘point of the compass’ or ‘direction’ but also ‘art’. Resonating with Jamie’s weather descriptions, ‘airt’ also chimes in, at least typographically, with ‘air’. In spelling and sound, the vowels of ‘arrive’, ‘air’, and ‘airt’ create a form of the ‘echoic patterning that we associate with verse’, which Noel-Tod identifies as a feature of the prose poem.50 Like the clouds, the components of Jamie’s prose work ‘together as a swift team’. Such visions of unity are taken up later in the paragraph, when the interaction of wind moving the grass and sunlight occur ‘in one movement, so light and air are as one, two aspects of the same entity’ (S, p. 91). As in ‘Aurora’, movement and light constitute the dominant semantic field, conforming to the prose poem’s ‘tendency to dwell on image over narrative’.51 As the lyric cadences of Jamie’s prose intensify, the narrator’s distinct position in time and space is not obliterated, however: ‘Where there are leaves, such as the holly 200 yards away, the wind lifts the leaves and the sun sweeps underneath. All moving because of the fresh wind’ (S, p. 92). While the rhythm of ‘wind lifts the leaves’ and ‘sun sweeps underneath’ imitate the upward motion of the leaves, the sentence also introduces the shift of focus towards human life in Jamie’s penultimate paragraph. The narrator’s attention turns towards the ‘four girls playing in the garden’, who, in the near future, will have lost interest in ‘playing’: ‘for a while, the garden will have no appeal, because everything they want will be elsewhere’ (S, p. 92). This transgression of the secluded space indicates the girls’ anticipated transition from childhood into their teenage years, a symbolic movement enhanced by the garden, which has served as a symbol of sheltered (and lost) innocence since the Biblical account of the fall of man. Jamie’s work itself transcends boundaries of form. In Noel-Tod’s account, the ‘distinctive feeling to which the prose poem gives form’ is ‘expansiveness’ as it extends the boundaries of the poetic line to occupy the paragraph and the page. Jamie’s approximation of the genre in ‘Light’ similarly expands the limits of prose narration as it traces the ‘movement’ from winter to spring, innocence to experience: ‘The year has turned. Filaments and metallic ribbons of wind-blown light, just for an hour, but enough’ (S, p. 92). Adapting the ‘out-in-out process’ performed by Abrams’s model of the Romantic nature lyric, the narrator’s vision shifts back outwards, recurring to the central image of ‘wind-blown light’, but with a changed, ‘turned’, attitude. A garden is also the setting of ‘Soledades’, named after the 1903 collection by the Spanish modernist poet Antonio Machado. Jamie’s prose poem exemplifies the intertextual engagement of contemporary nature writing and creates its own spin on ‘expansiveness’. The prose poem introduces the narrator’s search for her copy of Machado’s Soledades in the garden. The scene is a windy spring day in March. Daffodils are out, and there are blossoms on the neighbour’s pear tree. The narrator suspects ‘that the same breeze as makes the frogspawn quiver in our sandpit-turned-pond, as flaps the laundry, has snatched the book away’.52 A line break after ‘quiver’ interrupts the flow of the paragraph, as if the prose itself quivers and shape-shifts in the wind. Although the body of the poem is written in a paragraph of four sentences, the lines are not fully justified on the page. Such loose typesetting complements the movement of the plants touched by the personified breeze and, simultaneously, underlines that the boundaries between verse and prose are permeable. This permeability is made explicit in the final lines. Jamie’s voice disperses and meets that of Machado when the narrator discovers her book where she suspected it, lying open in the garden, as though the breeze, riffling through, had spotted his own name among the master’s lines: The deepest words of the wise man teach us the same as the whistle of the wind … (BC, p. 16) As the prose disintegrates into verses from Machado’s poem ‘Rebirth’, Jamie’s writing does not simply dissolve into the other poet’s but, through lineation and typesetting, creatively appropriates the predecessor. Machado’s poetry is broken up and cut short by ellipsis, with the lines – set underneath one another in the original – scattered across the page.53 In imitation of the Romantic Aeolian harp, where the music caused by the ‘desultory breeze’ embodies poetic inspiration, the wind crafts its own poetry from Machedo’s lines, but the poem in the book also ‘answers’ in its own image of ‘the whistle of the wind’ (emphasis in original).54 Nature assumes agency, as it often does in Jamie’s work, in the attempt to divert attention from the authorial ego. In ‘Soledades’, the wind moves the words, yet is being moved by them, too. Typically, Jamie’s ‘as though’ marks the passage as a simile and hesitates to fully embrace the pathetic fallacy. As her prose poem draws attention to its own uncertainly hybrid form, it also, self-consciously, disables its claim to let nature ‘speak’. ‘Soledades’ probes the encounter of prose and verse as well as the relationship between nature and culture, which has become fundamental to Jamie’s work in both genres. Conclusion The generic ambiguity of contemporary nature writing reflects the instability of nature itself as a concept. When Jamie’s and Macfarlane’s works address ‘nature’, their subject does not merely comprise the lives of plants and animals but also the questions how humans have altered and formed environments through paths and settlements, how we experience and make sense of natural phenomena, and how nature, in turn, shapes us. That the answers to such questions are permanently in flux is evinced by the tropes of movement and change that animate their writing and by their experiments with prose ‘affiliated to poetry’, in Jamie’s words. Such features are not limited to Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s oeuvres. Alice Oswald’s long poem Dart (2002) explodes the boundaries of lyric and repeatedly glides into prose as Oswald drifts along with the river’s motions, voicing those who live by or off the Dart. A ‘stonewaller’ in the poem expresses his love for ‘drift’, allowing the word to meld with ‘river’ as he celebrates the ‘driven’ nature of the water and his work.55 Amy Liptrot, in The Outrun (2016) intersperses her narrative of overcoming addiction with acute descriptions of lives and landscapes in the Orkney Islands that suggest Jamie’s direct influence. For example, Liptrot evokes the mobility of light in her account of the aurora, using cultural metaphors to sidestep romanticization: ‘In the past I have seen a greenish-tinged, gently growing arc, low across the north, but tonight the whole sky is alive with shapes: white “searchlights” beaming from behind the horizon, dancing waves directly above and slowly, thrillingly, blood red blooms’.56 Liptrot’s colour imagery and short phrases interspersed by commas achieve a liveliness that accommodates the ‘dancing’ movements in a manner similar to Jamie’s account of a ‘green restlessness’ in ‘Aurora’, but Liptrot’s bold vision of ‘blood red blooms’ also marks the originality of her experience and of her prose style. Melissa Harrison in Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (2016) is in step with Macfarlane’s method when she walks the Shropshire countryside and finds poetic effects in the peculiarities of a landscape more unassuming than Liptrot’s Orkney. Retracing the same routes enables Harrison to discern the unique rhythms of fields and paths. She speaks of having the landscape’s ‘measure’, comparing it to a piece of music that enters the head on repeated listening. Almost by necessity, her writing enters a dialogue with the harmonies her surroundings offer.57 The best prose nature writers seem compelled, as Harrison is, to produce literary forms sufficiently mobile to reflect altering and increasingly endangered surroundings and to test generic boundaries as they negotiate between human and non-human claims on our environments. If ‘nature writing’ remains a contested term – both on the part of authors and of book shops, where these works are often seen moving between sections such as ‘travel writing’, ‘nature and garden’, and ‘non-fiction’ – it is only evidence of the liveliness of a genre that hesitates to settle down. Footnotes 1 Charles Baudelaire, ‘For Arsène Houssaye’, in Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose, trans. by Keith Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), pp. 3–4 (p. 3). 2 Ibid. 3 Joe Moran, ‘A Cultural History of the New Nature Writing’, Literature & History, 23.1 (2014), 49–63 (p. 49). 4 Mark Cocker, ‘Death of the Naturalist: Why is the “New Nature Writing” so Tame?’, New Statesman, 17 June 2015 [accessed 27 April 2020]. 5 Examples of personal development as a theme of nature writing include Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2007), which traces the gradual reformation of the author’s understanding of ‘wildness’, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014), woven around a story of grief and consolation, and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016), which centres on Liptrot’s recovery from addiction. 6 Several studies have compared Jamie’s and Macfarlane’s works with regard to representations of landscape and place in the Anthropocene, often drawing on concepts from ecocriticism and spatial theory. These include, for example, Neal Alexander, ‘Theologies of the Wild: Contemporary Landscape Writing’, Journal of Modern Literature, 38.4 (2015), 1–15; Daniel Weston, Contemporary Literary Landscapes: The Poetics of Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Deborah Lilley, The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019); and Anneke Lubkowitz, Haunted Spaces in Twenty-First Century British Nature Writing (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). 7 John Elder, ‘Nature Writing: Prose’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, July 2017 [accessed 3 May 2019]. 8 Form is often discussed under the auspices of ‘ecopoetics’, a term introduced by Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000). Thus, Jonathan Skinner, editor of the journal ecopoetics, proposes a ‘taxonomy of nature writing (or of ecopoetry or ecopoetics)’, which defines four kinds of aesthetic configurations of materiality and topography. Jonathan Skinner, ‘Statement for “New Nature Writing”’, ecopoetics, 4/5 (2004–05), 127–29. See also, for example, Daniel Weston, ‘Contemporary Poetic Ecologies and a Return to Form’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, 4.1 (2016), 1–24, and Mary Bloomfield’s analysis of ‘a formally embodied investigation of environmental aesthetics and ethics’, in ‘Landscaping the Page: British Open-Field Poetics and Environmental Aesthetics’, Green Letters, 17.2 (2013), 121–36 (p. 122). 9 Simone Schröder, The Nature Essay: Ecocritical Explorations (Leiden: Brill, 2019), p. 20. 10 Jos Smith, The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 203. 11 Schröder, pp. 15–16. 12 British Prose Poems: The Poems Without Lines, ed. by Jane Monson (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson, ed. by Jeremy Noel-Tod (London: Penguin, 2018). 13 Jane Monson, ‘Introduction’, British Prose Poems, pp. 1–16 (p. 6). 14 Jeremy Noel-Tod, ‘Introduction: The Expansion of the Prose Poem’, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, pp. xix–xliv (p. xxix). 15 ‘Poetry’, in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. by Tom McArthur et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) [accessed 26 March 2020]. 16 Christian Schmitt-Kilb has also used the term ‘poetic prose’ in a discussion of the new nature writing. His ecocritical approach focuses on how these texts, as a new form of ‘life writing’, question anthropocentrism. See Christian Schmitt-Kilb, ‘“Untranslated Landscape”: Recent Poetic Prose of Kathleen Jamie and Paul Farley/Michael Symmons Roberts’, in English Topographies in Literature and Culture: Space, Place, and Identity, ed. by Ina Habermann and Daniela Keller (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 25–40. 17 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface [with additions of 1802]’, in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Nicholas Halmi (New York and London: Norton, 2014), pp. 76–96 (pp. 83–84, emphasis in original). 18 Percy B. Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York and London: Norton, 2002), pp. 509–39 (pp. 514, 515). 19 Stephen Gill, ‘Preface’, in Guide to the Lakes, by William Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest de Sélincourt, with a preface by Stephen Gill (London: Frances Lincoln, 2004), pp. v–viii (p. vii). 20 Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, p. 58. 21 Robert Macfarlane, ‘Call of the Wild’, The Guardian, 6 December 2003 [accessed 3 May 2019]. Lilley points out that ‘nature writing’ has become ‘something of a contested term for both writers and critics: evocative of a narrow focus at best and shortsighted escapism at worst’. Deborah Lilley, ‘New British Nature Writing’, in Oxford Handbooks Online, April 2017 [accessed 27 April 2020]. 22 Jason Cowley, ‘Editor’s Letter: The New Nature Writing’, Granta, 102 (2008), 7–12 (p. 10). 23 Weston, Poetics of Experience, p. 106. 24 Kathleen Jamie, ‘A Lone Enraptured Male’, Review of The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, London Review of Books, 30.5 (2008), 25–27. 25 Alexander, p. 9. 26 See T. S. Eliot, ‘The Borderline of Prose’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, ed. by Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber, 2014), pp. 537–43 (p. 539). 27 See, for example, Max Long, ‘Walking the Old Ways with Robert Macfarlane’, 26 January 2015 [accessed 27 April 2020]. 28 Weston, Poetics of Experience, pp. 112, 114. 29 John Carey, ‘His Boots are Made for Walking’, Sunday Times, 27 May 2012 [accessed 27 March 2020]. 30 Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (London: Penguin Books, 2012), p. 323. Hereafter quoted parenthetically in the text. 31 John Mullan, ‘The Old Ways – Guardian Book Club’, The Guardian, 11 July 2014 [accessed 3 May 2019]. 32 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. by Margaret Ferguson et al., 5th edn (New York and London: Norton, 2005), p. 1166, l. 2. Further references to the poem are given by line number in the text. 33 Rachel Joyce, ‘Walking in Wonderland: Why Are Rambling and Writing So Entwined?’, The Times, 16 June 2012, p. 45 [accessed 3 May 2019]. 34 Lubkowitz, p. 132. 35 Macfarlane’s historical and geological expertise is most wide-ranging when it comes to territories ‘at home’ in the British Isles. Yet the three chapters conjoined in the section ‘Roaming (Abroad)’, which records Macfarlane’s journeys through the West Bank in Palestine, on Spain’s Camino de Santiago, and to the mountain Minya Konka on the Tibetan plateau, are important cornerstones to the book’s ‘outward’ movements from the familiar into the unfamiliar. They address pressing political questions, the fact that walking, in some parts of the world, can be a matter of ‘ restricted movement and conflict’ (OW, p. 212), rather than a means of self-discovery. 36 Schröder, p. 5. 37 Edward Thomas, ‘As the team’s head brass’, in The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, ed. by R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 108–09 (p. 108). 38 Stephen E. Hunt, ‘The Emergence of Psychoecology: The New Nature Writings of Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker, Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey’, Green Letters, 10.1 (2009), 70–77 (p. 76). 39 Rosemary Goring, ‘The SRB Interview: Kathleen Jamie’, Scottish Review of Books, 8.2 (2012). [accessed on 25 March 2019]. 40 Lilley, New Pastoral, p. 76. 41 Schröder, p. 132. 42 Eleanor Bell, ‘Into the Centre of Things: Poetic Travel Narratives in the Work of Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd’, in Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her Work, ed. by Rachel Falconer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 126–34 (p. 129). 43 Ibid. 44 Weston, Poetics of Experience, pp. 128, 138. 45 Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines (London: Sort of Books, 2012), p. 12. Hereafter quoted parenthetically in the text. 46 Goring, non paginated. 47 Monson, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 48 Noel-Tod, ‘Introduction’, p. xxi. 49 M. H. Abrams, ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’, in Romanticism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. by Michael O’Neill and Mark Sandy, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 2006), vol. 1, pp. 197–224 (p. 78). 50 Noel-Tod, ‘Introduction’, p. xxviii. 51 Ibid., p. xxvi. 52 Kathleen Jamie, The Bonniest Companie (London: Picador, 2015), p. 16. Hereafter quoted in the text. 53 ‘Rebirth’ and the original Spanish version ‘Renacimiento’ are reprinted in Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. by Robert Bly (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), pp. 68–69. 54 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp: Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. by Duncan Wu, 3rd edn (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 601–05 (l. 14). 55 See Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 33. 56 Amy Liptrot, The Outrun (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016; repr. 2018), p. 168. 57 See Melissa Harrison, Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), p. 27. Stefanie John is Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at TU Braunschweig, Germany. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) TI - FORMS IN MOTION: THE POETIC PROSE OF ROBERT MACFARLANE AND KATHLEEN JAMIE JF - English DO - 10.1093/english/efaa028 DA - 2021-07-22 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/forms-in-motion-the-poetic-prose-of-robert-macfarlane-and-kathleen-ioFMCvBzgw SP - 1 EP - 1 VL - Advance Article IS - DP - DeepDyve ER -