Robinson, J. A. Baker, Barry Lopez… It’s these last two writers who have influenced me more than any others: Baker, the author of The Peregrine, and Lopez, whose masterpiece is Arctic Dreams, but whose essay collections Crossing Open Ground and About This Life are also magnificent. In The Peregrine (which I know was also a touchstone-book for Roger Deakin, as it is now for Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey), I saw how to describe the rapid actions of Nature, and I experienced the power of Baker’s metaphors: what an early reviewer called their “magnesiumflare intensity”. And Lopez’s hymn to the Arctic revealed to me the possibility of twining cultural history, anthropology, epiphany, travelogue, science and elegy. Lopez also convinced me that lyricism was a function of precision – and that exact and exacting attention to the natural world was a kind of moral gaze. Here is an exemplary passage from The Peregrine, describing the sea-margin hunt of a female peregrine: “Far out at sea, gulls called. One by one, the larks stopped singing. Waders sank into their shadows, and crouched small. A falcon peregrine, sable on a white shield of sky, circled over from the sea. She slowed, and drifted aimlessly, as though the air above the land was thick and heavy. She dropped. The beaches flared and roared with salvoes of white wings. The sky shredded up, was torn by whirling birds. The falcon rose and fell, like a black billhook in splinters of white wood. She slashed and ripped the air, but could not strike. Tiring, she flew inland. Waders floated down. Cawing rooks flew out to feed on plains of mud.” Now, this is almost a modernist prose poem. It has an Imagist quality to it, except that where Imagist poetry sought to present the act of perception, rather than the thing perceived, Baker wishes to present the act of perception of the thing perceived, by which I mean that he wants his prose to see like a peregrine. So it is that we – the reader – view the world from altitude, as does the bird. “Sank into shadows” is an effect visible only from above. You’ll notice Baker’s rhythms, too, the pace of his narrative. The section begins with three phrases of two clauses; these are

followed by two sentences of three clauses. The effect is one of deceleration: the peregrine soars in from the sea, then slows to prospect the hunting ground. Then, unexpectedly, comes the spasm: the single-claused stoop. “She dropped.” Verbs suddenly thicken in number: “dropped”, “flared”, “roared”, “shredded”, “torn”, “rose”, “fell”. A massive kinetic emanation – this is high-energy-release grammar. And then comes the restoration of calm after the falcon’s disappearance: the present-tense verb “tiring” reaches back to the only other gerund, “singing”, which had been an indicator of the calm preceding the falcon’s arrival. Brilliant! Indeed, the entire book is really a sustained meditation on vision and sight. Its aim is to bring

Of all the great landscape writers, Lopez’s austere style seems to me most purely to embody the terrain it describes.

Baker, and the reader, to see and think like the falcon. “Hawk-hunting sharpens vision,” writes Baker early on. “Pouring away behind the moving bird, the land flows out from the eye in deltas of piercing colour. Direction has colour and meaning… The eye becomes insatiable for hawks. It clicks towards them with ecstatic fury, just as the hawk’s eye swings and dilates to the luring food-shapes of gulls and pigeons.” Here, again, you can see Baker’s desire to learn to see like a falcon, and the book’s remarkable prose embodies these qualities of suddenness, and “direction” – by which he means the sharpened vectored flow of high-speed movement through a landscape.

LOPEZ IS A thoroughly different writer. Baker deals in rapidity, instinct, violence; Lopez, in slowness, reflection, beauty. The Arctic, Lopez once wrote, has “the classic lines of a desert landscape: spare, balanced, extended, and quiet” (one notes with admiration the adjectival balance – short-long-long-short – of that second clause), and the same, unmistakably, is true of Lopez’s prose. Of all the great landscape writers, Lopez’s austere style seems

to me most purely to embody the terrain it describes. Before writing Arctic Dreams, Lopez travelled for five years as a field biologist in the Canadian Arctic. In that time, he moved through the different territories of the region. The orange and ochre badlands of Melville Island; the wild canyons of the Hood River; Baffin Bay, where big bergs jostle slowly; and Pingok Island in the Beaufort Sea, where the tides are so slight that “it is possible to stand toe-to at the water’s edge, and, if one has the patience, see it gain only the heels of one’s boots in six hours.” When he began to write about the Arctic, Lopez was faced with the problem of purchase. How can language grip a landscape which is so close-toned, and which specialises in “great, unrelieved stretches of snow and ice” and “plains of open water”? How to describe a place whose immensity and capacity for self-replication are peerless? What Lopez understood, or came to discover through experience, was that detail anchors perception in a vast space. So his prose is varifocal. Again and again, he evokes the reach and clarity of an Arctic panorama, and then zooms in on a close-up: the gleaming and “chitinous shell of an insect” found in a tuffet of grass; “broken spider-webs”, signifying “irretrievable events”; the affinity of form between “the bones of a lemming” and the “strand of staghorn lichen next to them on the tundra”. The effect for the reader of these sudden shifts of perspective is exhilarating: as though Lopez had gripped you by the shoulder and pressed his binoculars to your eyes. As I’ve written before about Lopez, the best way to think of him is as a postmodern devout. His prose – priestly, intense, grace-noted – carries the hushed urgency of the sermon. Irony and ambiguity are not in his repertoire. His is an unshadowed style, “transparent as a polished windowpane”. For some readers, this urgency is too much. Jonathan Raban, in his fine book Passage to Juneau, describes how he tried to read Arctic Dreams, but had to set it aside, feeling scolded. “I found myself”, he remarks, “an agnostic in his church; embarrassed, half-admiring, unable to genuflect in the right places … aching for

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