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The Wild Life of the Fox
The Wild Life of the Fox
Nov 17, 2024 9:18 AM

Author:John Lewis-Stempel

The Wild Life of the Fox

"I adore the fox for its magnificence; I hate the fox for killing my chickens.

To love and loathe the fox is a British condition."

The fox is our apex predator, our most beautiful and clever killer. We have witnessed its wild touch, watched it slink by bins at night and been chilled by its high-pitched scream. And yet we long to stroke the tumbling cubs outside their tunnel homes and watch the vixen stalk the cornfield.

There is something about foxes. They captivate us like no other species.

Exploring a long and sometimes complicated relationship, The Wild Life of the Fox captures our love – and sometimes loathing – of this magnificent creature in vivid detail and lyrical prose.

Reviews

Real, simple, organic and sustainable food is what Daylesford offers - and these are the recipes for putting it on your table

—— Raymond Blanc

These are recipes to enchant every cook. When I think of how organic farming has been transformed, I think of Daylesford and its extraordinary and very beautiful food

—— Rose Prince

Supremely sophisticated - yet surprisingly straightforward.

—— Stylist Magazine

A timeless book with plenty to offer those keen to celebrate nature

—— James Stagg , Caterer

Excellent meat recipes and a particularly original selection of pies and tarts

—— Constance Craig Smith , Daily Mail, *Christmas Gift Guide 2020*

What might it mean to survive the incandescent distances between here and all we’ve ever left behind—the languages, the myths, the keepsakes and names? How can we return to lost things and those who love us, relearn what draws away from memory? Romalyn Ante traces paths back through such questions with the grace of lancets, illuminating scars and landscapes, celebrating the “invisible…goddesses of caring and tending” in this brilliant collection. It is something of miracle to experience a debut that charts our "dislocated world" with such incisive generosity. I am beyond grateful for these poems—each one pulsing with “the rhythm of a shockable heart.”

—— R.A. Villanueva

Ante's poems are like embers, pared back to a slow-burning emotional core whose intensity she sustains elegantly throughout the collection

—— Stephanie Sy-Quia , Times Literary Supplement

Poignant, beautiful, and meditative writing on movement - living in a foreign country, being away from one's family, speaking a language not quite your own... This is possibly the most beautiful thing I have read this year

—— Maria Lewandowska , The Poetry School *Poetry Books of the Year*

Ante writes with a voice that I can only imagine develops when the act of care is central to one's life. She minces no words. Antiemetic for Homesickness manages to stand so coherently as a collection on account of how the poems' polyphony of voices interact with one another. We are at the mercy of her retort to those who underestimate immigrant workers

—— Holly Loveday , Wild Court

Romalyn Ante's debut collection presents an important and magical display of culture and perspective. There is always that memory that pervades someone's mind of what it is to migrate from one's home to another place. How are the people back home? The people who were left behind, how are they? Have they changed? [Antiemetic for Homesickness] aims to tackle those questions with folklore and spirit and honor

—— Shaun Anto , Columbia Journal

Ante has an assured hand, with a mastery of form and freshness of vision... these are poems that pay testimony to Ante's deep sense of humanity, authenticity, and caring, together with a desire to make the best of what life brings

—— Mary Mulholland , The Alchemy Spoon

The 35 poems in this collection document stories of yearning as well as pluck and hard love... I'm rewarded with the privilege of witnessing how the poet-speaker's attention and empathy for others in the world continues to generously unfold

—— Luisa A. Igloria , RHINO

Ante is an adept artist who can seamlessly internalise the external and externalise the internal... This collection is also a treatise on mothering, un-mothering, and more significantly, remothering. The book is dedicated to Ante's mother, whose presence in many forms is palpable and penetrating

—— Cuilin Sang , Poetry Birmingham

The collection shines a welcome light on a too-often overlooked community, whose hard work and dedication to keeping the NHS afloat -- both before the pandemic and more so now -- puts this country enormously in debt

—— Stella Backhouse , Here Comes Everyone

Helen Macdonald's new essays are no flights of fancy, as she examines who has the right to define and be the gatekeepers to the natural world... [Vesper Flights shares] many of the qualities of H is for Hawk - frankness, reflective thinking, formidable powers of observation and wordcraft.

—— Susan Mansfield , Scotsman

Macdonald is a glorious writer... This book will make you look a bit harder at the wonders around you.

—— Nancy Durrant , Evening Standard

Interesting and accomplished... Vesper Flights establishes her [Macdonald] as a penetrating analyst of the relationship between humans and the non-human world... She is splendid company reflecting on nests and the meaning of home and place.

—— Charles Foster , Oldie

I finished the book seeing the natural world, and my place within it, afresh.

—— BBC Wildlife

One of this century's greatest nature writers, Helen Macdonald takes simple moments - of nesting birds, wild boars emerging from the woods, foraging for mushrooms on an autumn day - and weaves them with history, personal reflection and political comment.

—— Amy Barrett , BBC Science Focus Magazine

H is for Hawk turned many a reader into a goshawk fan... This lyrical essay collection also explores human relationships with the natural world, but has a wider scope, taking in a search for the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests and swan-upping on the Thames.

—— Country Living

Vesper Flights...reminds us we too are part of the natural world.

—— Michael Hodges , Radio Times

Vesper Flights...[takes] the reader on exhilarating adventures.

—— Lisa Allardice , Guardian

This nature writer's long-awaited follow-up to her influential 2014 memoir H is for Hawk is a treat: dive into essays about headaches and high-rises, catching swans and farming ostriches.

—— Daily Telegraph

Their subject matter is marvellously diverse, taking in nests, ants, hares, glow-worms, mushrooms, migration and more... These are urgent pieces designed to open our eyes to the state of the environment.

—— Caroline Sanderson , Daily Mirror

Vesper Flights is a book of tremendous purpose.

—— Jake Cline , Independent

Gorgeously evocative prose, original insights and deep knowledge.

—— Gwendolyn Smith , i

[Macdonald's] beautifully written essays go a long way to improving our perception.

—— Ian Critchley , Sunday Times

A collection of wonderfully evocative essays on wildlife.

—— Choice

[An] urgently beautiful book about the haunted meanings of belonging in the world.

—— Mathew Lyons , New Humanist

Stunning.

—— Time Magazine *10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020*

Vesper Flights weaves a beautiful proposition: by noticing how wonder arises and flows, we can learn something about what it means to be alive.

—— Merlin Sheldrake , Foyles *Author Picks for Christmas 2020*

These individual essays are about badgers and ants, goldfinches and swans, but through their constellation Macdonald is able to get at something fundamental about the human condition.

—— Adam Weymouth , Resurgence & Ecology

I should have started reading Helen Macdonald a long time ago and now I'm unlikely to stop. These essays and reflections are just as compelling as her celebrated H is for Hawk, and come together as a kind of manual for being in the world as you look at it.

—— Jon McGregor , Week

Lovely, thoughtful and sometimes sobering essays on the vanishing natural world.

—— Reader's Digest

This book is a powerful - and entertaining - corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species.

—— Tim Adams , Guardian

Macdonald has a wonderful gift for exploring the intersection between nature and our experience of it, in writing that is both lyrical and impassioned.

—— Hannah Beckerman , Observer
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