Landmarks

From Robert Macfarlane, the acclaimed author of The Old Ways — 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.

“Landmarks is Macfarlane’s defense of the appreciation of nature and the art of nature writing, of which he has become a sort of British high priest…the writing is full of clarity and internal reflections.” The Sunday Times

“This joyous meditation on land and language is a love letter to the British Isles.” The Guardian

“Takes Macfarlane’s fascination with the language of the natural world to a startling new level…Landmarks is a kind of manual of how people in love with place and language are created by landscape, and, in turn, create their art.” The Telegraph

“A book about the language that nature calls into being, on the page and in the mind’s eye.” The Independent

“Astonishing and revelatory.” The Spectator

Robert Macfarlane is the author of a prizewinning trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, and The Old Ways. He has contributed to Harper’s, Granta, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.