J. A. Baker, The Peregrine. Article in Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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The Peregrine, [45] 31

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B is for Baker, J. A. | From the Slightly Foxed archives

We’re continuing our travels through the Slightly Foxed archive, selecting an article a week that everyone – whether you’re a subscriber to the magazine or not – can read for free while spending more time at home. This week Annabel Walker takes us to buzzard country as she rides the wind and tracks peregrines with J. A. Baker in this article from SF Issue 45.

Wood Engraving, Peregrine

C. F. Tunnicliffe

‘I was simply searching for the best writing on birds when I came across J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) – a book that isn’t so much the ‘best’ as the only writing of its kind on the subject . . . ’ Annabel Walker introduced us to J.A. Baker, his book and its powerful subject in issue 45 of Slightly Foxed. Her article was illustrated by this wood engraving by C. F. Tunnicliffe.

Riding the Wind

Annabel Walker on J. A. Baker, The Peregrine

Living in buzzard country, I should have been looking for a book that would fill the many gaps in my knowledge of these avian next-door neighbours. In fact, I was simply searching for the best writing on birds when I came across J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) – a book that isn’t so much the ‘best’ as the only writing of its kind on the subject. An account of the tracking of peregrines across a small patch of country in eastern England, its prose is really poetry of the most intense kind; experience compressed into a language that has been honed to the keenest of edges. Baker wields it fiercely, dispensing almost immediately with convention (‘Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious’), slicing early paragraphs of information into staccato sentences and cutting and splicing verbs, nouns and adjectives so that the reader cannot help but see all anew, through Baker’s passionate eye.

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