It is winter. And we still don't have a garden. So I've been immersing myself in a whole pile of books with nature, gardens and the outdoors as their theme.
Successfully capturing nature via the written word is no mean feat. There's a great quote by Stephen Fry (in Paperweight I think) where he talks about how hard the writers art is relative to other forms. Sculptors, painters, musicians get to use a medium that is exceptional. Few people can effectively 'operate' stone, or musical instruments or paint. Writers on the other hand get to work with the words we all use on a daily basis. Creating something 'new' that communicates without resorting to cliche is a much greater challenge.
And especially when it comes to communicating the natural world. Put simply it tends to be better first hand than second hand. Seeing, feeling and experiencing it tends to be better than hearing about it or seeing a picture. If not better then certainly a qualitatitively different experience.
I wonder if this is why so many of our finest poets so frequently included nature pieces in their repertoire. Rising to the challenge. Flexing their skills. Aiming high.
Roger Deakin has some insight on this. He is something of a master of the genre. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm has been the highlight of my recent pile of outdoor inspired reading. And has hugely whetted my appetite for reading his other books, Wildwood and Waterlog. At one point he reflects on his own craft of writing. In conversation with another skilled wordsmith, his friend Robert MacFarlane he describes poetry as a means of warming up for effectively writing in prose:
"Rob spoke of the need to find a new language to write about, say, wood. We both had written poems as a way into the work. I wrote Waterlog poems to limber up - my Chatham Docks poem, and my wheelbarrow poem. And Robert wrote his personal climbing experiences as poems before he wrote them as prose. I said Arthur Miller did this with his plays...But also there is a preoccupation with shaping things - Miller had his workshop and furniture making and his barn building and tree planting" (Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, p. 42).
Limbering up. Practice. Exercises and scales. The secret of refining a craft and capturing the world with words.
