The glossary-“at once a puzzle and a key”-identifies each species depicted, turning poetry to practicality and allowing this petite volume to do double-duty as an artful field guide. Morris’s fluid artwork renders the elegant tilt of a fox’s snout, birds’ calligraphic flight patterns, and the eyelike whorls of silver birch bark.

But there has always been singing in dark times-and wonder is needed now more than ever.” Macfarlane’s lyrics-often, though not always, structured as acrostics-ring with consonance (“Thrift thrives where most life fails, falls,/ is cast adrift”) and wordplay (“Woodpecker, tree-wrecker”) to limn 21 ordinary wonders of the British countryside, many of which are also common North American species.

But where their The Lost Words exhilarated, with its defiant reclamation of discarded dictionary words, this collection’s songs both describe and lament, swerving between ecstatic highs and plangent notes of sorrow: “Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear. In 2020 Jackie published The Lost Spells, billed as the little sister. Tell me a Dragon, East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans. Macfarlane and Morris reunite to conjure the wonder of goldfinches and gorse, foxes and snow hares in this second volume of illustrated poems designed to spark a deeper love and appreciation for the natural world. Robert Macfarlane Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge and the author of bestselling and prize winning books, including The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Holloway and Landmarks.

The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane