Julia Blackburn—who lives on the Suffolk coast—is an ideal guide to such territory, her oblique, allusive paragraphs leavening pure pedagogy with memoir and the often startling richness of her own imagination ... Suffice to say, Time Song is not a straightforward book about Doggerland. It is much more interesting than that ... A book like this could easily be dry and academic, or if not, very heavy on the singular first person pronoun. But Time Song is richly peopled, Blackburn’s unflagging curiosity and sharp eye bringing a diverse cast of characters vividly to life. She sifts their stories not just for information, but for meaning; she’s conjuring for us not merely the facts of Doggerland, but the weight of its omission from our history books, our collective memory and our imaginations.

Blackburn has a talent for envisioning bygone worlds ... Time Song jumps between vast epochs of time as Blackburn ponders the history of the English coast and its counterpart in the Netherlands ... Unfortunately, many of the glimpses the reader gets are in the form of strange, somewhat awkward prose poems Blackburn calls 'time songs.' There are 18 of them, and they contain some of the book’s most interesting facts and ideas ... But the format is distracting. The book also bogs down in descriptions of the eccentric collectors Blackburn meets, whose homes and garages overflow with the bones of extinct rhinos and the teeth of bygone shrews. These scenes drag on, with no real forward momentum.

Blackburn conducts her investigations by way of a sort of stubborn pottering. It is research as beachcombing, patiently sifting, waiting to see what the tide has brought in. The story of Doggerland and its enigmatic inhabitants accumulates via dreamy, seemingly half-distracted anecdotes and encounters ... These encounters are interspersed by what Blackburn calls 'time songs', 18 elliptical, quasi-poetic summaries of books and interviews, condensing dense compendia of information into something not so much like songs as lecture notes ... They share a slightly awkward quality, but what they do transmit is a sense of intense effort, like being with someone who is listening very hard ... Vanished but close, Doggerland serves as a ready metaphor for lost things, the extinct and the dead. Perhaps it’s simply a mark of Blackburn’s attention to fragility, but it’s noticeable that many of her Doggerland interlocutors are ill, limping after Lyme disease or crippled with spinal muscular atrophy.

This is an extraordinary book about time, absence and perception ...Through close observation and abstract ruminations, the vanished land that once connected...two countries starts to emerge both as a symbol of unity and a porous boundary between the living and the dead. By trying to see through 'the fact of absence,' the author becomes aware of the continued presence of the past—hoping perhaps that, in this way, her husband will remain close ... as a writer, Ms. Blackburn can go beyond the scientific, switching on the light of imagination to reveal the people of the past ... Through tracing this consciousness back to the people who left their imprint on Doggerland, Ms. Blackburn shows us that, in a time of flux and friction, the gathering of uncertainties can bring greater awareness and a sense of wholeness.

...a magical, mesmerising book – a book which makes you feel giddy at the thought of the deep gulf of history hidden just beneath your feet ... To describe Time Song as a non-fiction book about the history of Doggerland makes it sound dry and academic, but Julia Blackburn’s approach is anything but. At one point, she describes her modus operandi as 'trying to learn prehistory hand to mouth as I go along' and that’s a more-or-less accurate description of what it feels like to read her writing ... Blackburn’s book is studded with...imaginative leaps, grounded in science yet evocatively described.

For all these marvels, though, I struggled with Time Song ... the challenge its author sets herself here is...enormous, her subject being... elusive, even invisible to a degree...she combines memoir with an unusually agreeable form of oral history ... Time Song feels silted up, somehow, [Blackburn's] paragraphs heavily caked not only with geology and archaeology, but with some slightly beside-the-point personal digressions, too ... I do see that this muddiness could be said to be highly appropriate. But it doesn’t always make for clear or satisfying reading ... Blackburn has punctuated her narrative with a series of what she calls Time Songs, but are basically narrative poems, most of which are inspired by her background reading.I must be honest: I was not sure about these. Some readers may appreciate their concision, and the change of pace they represent, but they seemed to me to be at once both plodding and a bit fey. I could have done without them.

Anyone in search of a conventional account of this North Sea Atlantis and what we know about it needs to look elsewhere ... Time Song offers something very different. It is a peculiar bricolage of personal reminiscence, contemplation of loss after the death of her husband, encounters with eccentric individuals committed to the unearthing of the distant past, vivid descriptions of fossils, shells and bones that bear witness to that past ... There are many beauties to be found in Blackburn’s writing, particularly when she turns an observant eye on landscapes and the evidence they provide of the prehistoric peoples who inhabited them, but Time Song proves confusing more often than it does enlightening.

...Time Song itself is a kind of beautiful bog, a memoir-cum-meditation focusing on the stretch of land that once connected Britain to the Continent ... Blackburn neither tunnels nor digs, but accepts and sifts. Rarely have I read a book in which there is such an entrancingly liquid and easy drift between the metaphorical and the actual, so that when she describes the ‘breathing’ surface of the North Sea, there is a crossing of boundaries in the phrase: breathing both now and in deep time, the ebbing and flowing of the sea across the land that for the moment lies beneath it, but will just as surely one day ebb again. It feels both Wordsworthian and Woolfian, accepting the dissolution of boundaries in a dynamic tidal psychic geography that becomes Blackburn’s description of the nature of being ... This is not science or history (there are enough books like that) but understanding ... This book is a wonder.

...Time Song adds up to an uneven, thick in places and sparse in others, arranged assemblage of sentences and fragments, and stoic, mannered art to match the broken efforts to recover lost lives and to commemorate present difficulties at giving voice or impression to fleeting emotions. Blackburn remains an attentive and skillful guide to unexpected places, here no less than her impressive oeuvre over many decades. The ruminations and peregrinations gathered up into this contemplative collection should motivate her readers to seek out her past forays into other forgotten corners of the earth, which rise and resist the sea and the shattering of time and space.

...Ms Blackburn is a collector with an eye for minutiae. Like an archaeologist’s shelf, her writing is filled with detail ... She relays what the experts she meets say and do, but also notes the muffins they eat, and her nervous chuckle when one of them comments on her untidy handwriting. These mildly eccentric folk, and Ms Blackburn’s responses to them, strike a humorous note rarely found in nature writing. But it is in her descriptions of the sea and her imaginings of the land it submerged that Ms Blackburn’s book is most arresting. In her evocation of Doggerland, and how it may have looked or felt before being flooded by rising seas around 8,000 years ago, she is quick to see a parallel with modern climate change ... Time Song is not overtly political. Brexit is mentioned only briefly, despite the obvious echo of Britain once again trying to sever connections with the adjacent landmass. But it is deeply concerned about the environment, and how people treat and remember the landscape ... Ms Blackburn’s poetry, interspersed throughout, is less compelling than her lyrical prose. Yet the combination of wry observations and personal reflections makes Time Song gripping.

...[a] lyrical exploration of Doggerland, the country that until 6,000 years ago connected Britain with mainland Europe and now lies under the North Sea. Alternating chapters of prose with prose-poems...Blackburn creates an impressionistic picture of a place that is both gone and yet still there, its landscape partly intact beneath the waves ... This sweet, sad book will leave its readers meditating on loss and timelessness.

The author creates a lyrical narrative of her journey: deft portraits of the men and women she interviewed and poetic reflections on her discoveries, her husband’s death, and the infinity of the past. Her narrative is more poetic, surely, than her 18 'Time Songs,' whose rhythm and language are decidedly proselike. The book is illustrated with maps, and the songs are accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings, some evoking the fanciful style of Paul Klee, by Spanish painter Brinkmann, Blackburn’s longtime friend. A sensitively rendered chronicle of discovery.