... a remarkable book on language and landscape by the British academic, nature writer and word lover ... For a book so self-effacing and respectful of the words of others, Landmarks is wildly ambitious, part outdoor adventure story, part literary criticism, part philosophical disquisition, part linguistic excavation project, part mash note — a celebration of nature, of reading, of writing, of language and of people who love those things as much as the author does ... This book feels like an antidote to [ugly language], as startling and interesting and fizzy as the word 'zugs,' which in Exmoor refers to 'little bog islands, about the size of a bucket,' and is one of dozens of unexpected terms compiled in the glossaries that punctuate this book. They read like poetry ... [Macfarlane's] book had such a strong effect on me, and it was more visceral than cerebral.
... compelling ... Landmarks covers a good deal of ground, from the Arctic north to the Sierra Nevada, while homing in on distinctive British chosen grounds, all abundant in imagery and implications, social, moral and regenerative implications ... Keeping the country in good heart by celebrating the countryside in all its aspects: this is one of Macfarlane’s aims, and one that is wonderfully achieved.
Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks... is much more than a harrowing elegy for the British rural scene, with which up until recently we were intimately connected. The book is an apocalyptic vision ... [Macfarlane's] glossary contains... jewels ... Macfarlane provides enough evidence to show how language has both shaped our sense of place and terrain... and also how it embodies our national (and regional) personalities and temperaments.
This is the tone of Landmarks – generous, sensitive, yielding always to the words of others even while Macfarlane’s own exquisite feel for language and its inferences carry us along ... Is there another book – fiction or nonfiction – so generous in its nature, that has in its very structure the matrices of other writing and study and poetry fixed intricately into its threads and lines like webs within webs or currents within streams within rivers within seas? Landmarks may be single-minded in its pursuit of the exact, the particular, but in its articulation it sounds a chord of voices – of communities, writers, literatures – that may include the reader’s own.
All [the language Macfarlane introduces] is a delight, even if handing out lists of words is a peculiarly writerly solution to the problem of losing touch with the land ... This is not vintage Macfarlane, then, but there are moments when you taste it, when the writing is full of clarity and internal reflections, and the chapters ripple over into each other like, well, a linked chain of mountain pools ... But it is the glossaries that stand out, and by their very plainness they make the essay sections feel over-ornamented. The words stand so strongly on their own ... What is remarkable about these words is how precise they are, and how deeply local. They feel as if they somehow grew out of the land itself. This book too often feels the opposite; it feels somehow imposed and imposing, like a specimen tree in the wrong landscape. It is a faltering in form from a fine — sometimes too fine — writer.
Landmarks is a bigger book than it first appears. There is a manifesto quality to it, a more urgent beat than in his previous work ... The result is a step forward for Macfarlane and for nature writing ... The achievement of Landmarks is not just to return a lost vocabulary ... [Macfarlane] offers an enriched nature, seen through the eyes of our forebears, who knew it better, and more besides ... As for Macfarlane, every movement needs stars. In him we surely have one, burning brighter with each book.
... as teeming and complex as an ecosystem ... Again and again, what [Macfarlane] identifies is years of utterly focused looking distilled into rarefied and highly charged prose. Yet there is plenty of texture here, created by the variety of relationships Macfarlane has with his subjects ...
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Elegant and scholarly, but never po-faced, Landmarks is both a bid to save our rich haul of landscape language, and a blow struck for the power of a deep, creative relationship to place...
... beautifully written ... Macfarlane bemoans the gradual disappearance of these colorful descriptors from modern usage, resulting in a 'blandscape' of general terms. It would be fabulous if his wish in writing this exceptional compilation—for these words to 're-wild' contemporary speech—comes true.
