Macdonald grew up obsessed with birds of prey and later trained them, so she knows what to do and has all the necessary equipment: the tiny leather hood, as beautifully made, an observer says, as a Prada shoe the jesses, or tethering straps bells and transmitters. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.”īack home, the bird fills “the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.” Fatherless mourner and baby hawk become acquainted. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. At the first glimpse of her bird, Macdonald’s “heart jumps sideways.” And so does the reader’s, for here is a creature worth writing about: “A reptile. Early on, she drives to Scotland from her home in Cambridge to pick up a captive-bred, 10-week-old, Czech-Finnish-German goshawk she’s seen online. Bigger, “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier,” she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with.Īlthough “animal as emotional healer” is a familiar motif, Macdonald’s journey clears its own path - messy, muddy and raw. She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. In her breathtaking new book, “H Is for Hawk,” winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence - and her own - with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.

It calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. If birds are made of air, as the nature writer Sy Montgomery says, then writing a great bird book is a little like dusting for the fingerprints of a ghost.

Helen macdonald