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Work InformationA Claxton Diary: Further Field Notes from a Small Planet by Mark Cocker
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Another beautiful, revelatory country diary from one of the best nature writers in Britain. 'If you've never read Mark Cocker, then you must. His style is sharp, selfless, and wonderfully evocative, his knowledge deep and wide-ranging but lightly borne, his curiosity joyful and infectious.' Mail On Sunday, Books of the Year For seventeen years, as part of his daily writerly routine, the author and naturalist Mark Cocker has taken a two-mile walk down to the river from his cottage on the edge of the Norfolk Broads National Park. Over the course of those 10,000 daily paces he has learnt the art of patience to observe a butterfly, a bird, flower, bee, deer, otter or fly and to take pleasure in all the other inhabitants of his parish, no matter how seemingly insignificant. In turn these encounters have then been converted into literary epiphanies that are now a widely celebrated part of his work. In A Claxton Diary he has gathered some of the finest short essays that he has ever written on wildlife. They range over almost everything he can see, touch or smell, from the minute to the cosmic, from a strange micromoth called yellow-barred longhorn to that fiercest of winter storms the so-called 'Beast from the East'. From the marvellous to the macabre, Cocker tries to capture nature without flinching and in its entirety. In so doing he provides us with a vision of an English country parish that for intimacy and precise detail is comparable with Gilbert White's diary on Selbourne. Above all he reminds us that we are all just members of one miraculous family, fashioned from sunlight and the dust from old stars. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)508.0942619Natural sciences and mathematics General Science Natural historyRatingAverage: (4.5)
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Wikipedia in English
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We know that at some level there is no such thing as season or month or week or even a day. There is just the liquid passage of time flowing across our lives that we chop and segment with these invented names to give it all clarity and structure.
He has distilled these walks into a series of columns that first were published in the Guardian and have now appeared here in a month by month diary. They are reproduced in day order, so the years jump around, but for me, that adds to the charm. You have the sense that these columns show the way that the world is changing too. His subjects vary from badgers to owls, to bees and flowers, as well as trees, climate, weather, bees, deer, fungi, frogs, oh, and bees again.
He doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of life; that the hedgerow full of juvenile birds are more than likely to be the next meal for the sparrow hawk that he has just seen, the spiders catching and wrapping wasps and bumblebees and the swifts cutting through the sky eating the insects that are never going to get out of the way in time. But this is about the beauty of his regular haunts too, seeing the first flush of wildflowers, hearing the dawn chorus and the smell of summer rain. He does occasionally venture further afield and there are columns from Greece, Scotland and elsewhere in Norfolk.
This is another wonderful book by Cocker. He has been writing about the natural world for the past fifty years and while he has seen some of the world great creatures, he gets as much pleasure from the exotica that we can find around us if we care to look for it. It is a worthy continuation to his first, Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet, which I can also highly recommend along with this. (