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Product Description
Review
Not just for twitchers: his style is dynamic, vivid, startling, and so beautiful that you'll read each sentence over and over. (Country Walking )
A great piece of nature writing that brilliantly evokes the Essex landscape. (BBC Countryfile )
A great piece of nature writing that brilliantly evokes the Essex landscape. (BBC Countryfile )
Review
‘…an inspiring example to future writers, and a gift to lovers of nature.’
The Times Literary Supplement
‘… a literary masterpiece, one of the 20th century’s outstanding examples of nature writing.’
Independent
‘The Peregrine should be known as one of the finest works on nature ever written'
BBC Wildlife
‘… some of the most marvellous prose of the twentieth century.’
Literary Review
‘A tour de force … what can I do except praise writing which involves all the senses? This book goes altogether outside the bird-book into literature.’
The Sunday Times
‘A rapt and remarkable book … his phrases have a magnesium-flare intensity.’
Observer
‘… what is certain is that The Peregrine is the most precise and poetic account of a bird – possibly of any non-human creature – ever written in English prose.’
The Daily Telegraph
‘J. A. Baker's poetic prose has a hard intensity and an exquisite lyric grace that takes it far beyond the stereotypical stuff of larks ascending and questing voles. Cruelly beautiful and brutally exact, it sees the countryside anew to give us nature in the wild and in the raw.’
The Scotsman
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First Sentence
East of my home, the long ridge lies across the skyline like the low hull of a submarine. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
East of my home, the long ridge lies across the skyline like the low hull of a submarine. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
56 of 56 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I haven't ever reviewed anything on Amazon before but felt compelled to seeing that this astonishing book has not yet had one. The Peregrine, written by the reclusive librarian and naturalist J.A.Baker is a unique work, and certainly the best modern prose nature writing I have encountered. It should take its place beside Manley Hopkins notebooks and poems and the poetry of Les Murray and Ted Hughes. It is the last of these is that it most resembles with its intense distillations of natural violence, of planetary process seen in the local and nature seen without romantic overlay, functioning beyond human consciousness. The book consists of a short essay on the natural history of the peregrine falcon followed by an edited diary of days spent watching a few individuals over one winter and spring. There is therefore a repetition of days out watching, dawns and dusks, which becomes deeply hypnotic. Baker eschews any autobiographical writing; it is the inhuman drama of the birds lives that the reader becomes immersed in. He has a facility for metaphor every bit as good as Hughes' and, as in Hughes, the effect produced is of shockingly vivid arrest of the natural world. It is simply some of the best prose I have read.
In short, The Peregrine is unlike anything I have read before, a book that I will continue to live with and quite probably reread once a year. Do not delay before discovering this remarkable work.
In short, The Peregrine is unlike anything I have read before, a book that I will continue to live with and quite probably reread once a year. Do not delay before discovering this remarkable work.
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The first time I read this book, it jumped into my list of top five best books ever read. By the third time it was at number one.
The whole thing is lyrical, mesmerising and full of a strong sense of drama. All Baker does is go out and watch the peregrines. The birds exhibit normal bird behaviour: they fly, they hunt, they feed, they rest. Baker's prose infuses this daily ritual with a constant breathless beauty, and it sticks in your mind for ages after you've finished the book. He describes a nightjar's call as "a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask"; an owl's face as "grotesque, as though some lost and shrunken knight had withered to an owl"; the winter, when it arrives, as so cold that "Layers of ice seemed to shatter across my frozen face." Every single sentence in the book is beautiful and deeply affecting. It completely transcends category--it belongs in every library. I only wish there were an audio version so I could listen to it every day as well.
The whole thing is lyrical, mesmerising and full of a strong sense of drama. All Baker does is go out and watch the peregrines. The birds exhibit normal bird behaviour: they fly, they hunt, they feed, they rest. Baker's prose infuses this daily ritual with a constant breathless beauty, and it sticks in your mind for ages after you've finished the book. He describes a nightjar's call as "a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask"; an owl's face as "grotesque, as though some lost and shrunken knight had withered to an owl"; the winter, when it arrives, as so cold that "Layers of ice seemed to shatter across my frozen face." Every single sentence in the book is beautiful and deeply affecting. It completely transcends category--it belongs in every library. I only wish there were an audio version so I could listen to it every day as well.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Recently I have read birdlife described by birders, a stand up comedian and a prize-winning journo. The beauty of this writing surpasses them as the Golden Jubilee Diamond does cubic zirconia.
It relates the author's obsessive stalking of a peregrine falcon and its mate across the East Anglian countryside. He transforms the insouciant weather, landscape and falcon into interlocking metaphors of each other.
The falcons soar and stoop over their territory, their progress tracked by the clouds of birds that burst up as they pass. Sometimes foolhardy crows, jays and blackbirds pursue them, but they are dropped by the disdainful wing flicks of this the world's fastest creature.
At times the descriptions of savagery are simultaneously beautiful and breathtakingly visceral. Almost every paragraph contains a gem in a carefully crafted setting:
"...The kingfisher shone in mud at the river's edge, like a brilliant eye. He was tattered with blood, stained with the blood red colour of his stumpy legs that were stiff and red as sticks of sealing wax, cold in the lapping ripple of the river. He was like a dead star, whose green and turquoise light still glimmers down through the long light years."
A book to be read slowly and enjoyed with full visualisation.
It relates the author's obsessive stalking of a peregrine falcon and its mate across the East Anglian countryside. He transforms the insouciant weather, landscape and falcon into interlocking metaphors of each other.
The falcons soar and stoop over their territory, their progress tracked by the clouds of birds that burst up as they pass. Sometimes foolhardy crows, jays and blackbirds pursue them, but they are dropped by the disdainful wing flicks of this the world's fastest creature.
At times the descriptions of savagery are simultaneously beautiful and breathtakingly visceral. Almost every paragraph contains a gem in a carefully crafted setting:
"...The kingfisher shone in mud at the river's edge, like a brilliant eye. He was tattered with blood, stained with the blood red colour of his stumpy legs that were stiff and red as sticks of sealing wax, cold in the lapping ripple of the river. He was like a dead star, whose green and turquoise light still glimmers down through the long light years."
A book to be read slowly and enjoyed with full visualisation.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Really beautiful
This is a unique book. A strange mix of repetitive prose and achingly beautiful poetry. A lonely man tracks a bird across the wide and windy countryside. Don't miss this book.
Published 9 months ago by John Donaldson
Nature in the raw, reverently depicted
I was recommended this book by a dear friend of mine. We both share a passion for nature and writing and this book is an incomparable example of the two fused together. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Luke Kadinopoulos
Remarkable!
This book - which is really two books and a set of diary entries - posses a number of issues for the reader. Read more
Published 14 months ago by SCM
A remarkable book
I've read several well regarded accounts of the natural world recently and this is on another level with regards to command of the language - which is remarkable in making the many... Read more
Published 14 months ago by milesrichardson.co.uk
An essay of field notes
I read this book right through 10 months ago after purchasing it, but at that time, I had grave misgivings about its content. Read more
Published 14 months ago by M. Foden
Is this guy for real?
I feel like I am going to get a backlash here, or at least some comments. Amidst the rave reviews of this book, both on Amazon and elsewhere, I have to admit that I have problems... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Denzil Walton
The Peregrine
An excellent book that lives up to all the reviews I have read. I have been enthralled reading this book, which at times is almost poetic. Rightfully regarded as a classic.
Published 21 months ago by B. Whiting
Evocative, brilliant and compelling
The Peregrine is excellent. A lyrical, yet down to earth description of a winter tracking a pair of these formidable birds. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Neville
The myth of hawks
'The Peregrine' has become something of a landmark book for me. When I was young (like 10 - 16) I had a real obsession with birds, and in particular birds of prey. Read more
Published on 31 May 2010 by Mr. T. S. Swann
Astoundingly brilliant
I first read The Peregrine more than thirty years ago and this beautiful, though often melancholic, love letter to the English countryside has stayed with me ever since. Read more
Published on 27 Mar 2010 by A. Webb
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