![]() ![]() Lau’s Kris Drever brings a visceral quality to the Fox spell – “Red is your art, red your animal heart” – while the Gorse spell cleverly fuses plant and human nature – “prickly, cussed, hard to handle”. The assorted flora and creatures evoked by Macfarlane’s words underpin the album. Masterfully produced by Andy Bell, their voices swell in inclusive choral harmony, with unforced high notes from Hebridean singer Julie Fowlis. ![]() The playing is assured – Rachel Newton’s harp and Beth Porter’s cello deserve special mention – but it’s the group’s collective vocals that ace it. A century and a half after Whitman, writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris two poets of nature in the vastest Baldwinian sense compose one such living benediction in The Lost Spells ( public library ). Their follow-up, inspired by Macfarlane and Morris’s recent The Lost Spells, proves equally captivating, setting its 15 subjects – Swifts, Barn Owl, Bramble and the like – to a serendipitous blend of guitar, harp, woodwind, kora and more. Robert Macfarlane's spell-poems and Jackie Morris's watercolour illustrations are musical and magical: these are summoning spells, words of recollection. ![]() ![]() F ormed to give musical voice to The Lost Words, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s bestselling meditations on British wildlife, this collective of folk alumni triumphed with 2019’s album of the same name, not least in performance, with a streamed concert at London’s Natural History Museum this year enjoying a global audience of 55,000. The Lost Spells evokes the wonder of everyday nature, conjuring up red foxes, birch trees, jackdaws, and more in poems and illustrations that flow between the pages and into readers' minds. ![]()
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