![]() The British population of nightingales has declined from hundreds of thousands in the 1960s to the 5,000 or so left now. As Lee points out, nightingales are so gaudily extravagant in their singing, so strangely able to utter “every possible character, tone and temperature imaginable”, that any attempt to describe their song in words is doomed to fail. The Nightingale is buoyed along on the tide of Lee’s enthusiasm, and if the prose is occasionally asked to carry a little more emotion than it can bear, or if the language deepens to a twilight shade of purple, it is not only forgivable, it’s almost the point. Lee has devoted almost a decade to the nightingale, finding new ways of engaging with this great harbinger of spring, of representing it in song and in words. Nightingales are so extravagant in their singing that any attempt to describe their song in words is doomed to failĪt a time when it feels as if every week brings the latest H Is for Hawk wannabe to the overstuffed natural history sections of our bookshops, nature writers need to be able to call upon the authority of lived experience to bring authenticity to their work. Part nature writing, part memoir, part miscellany, every page of this book benefits from the incredible intimacy that Lee has built up with the bird over the years of his “undoubtedly romantic and whimsical” pilgrimages to listen to, and sing back to, nightingales. Now Lee, a tousle-haired former Mercury prize nominee (for his 2012 debut album, Ground of Its Own), has turned from song to prose with The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird, a beautiful, lyrical, heartfelt book about the songbird. After listening to its otherworldly carolling for a while, Lee and Dickson took turns singing back to the nightingale, old shanties and folk songs, praising the beauty of its voice, recognising the importance of its role in that bright space where culture and nature meet. We came to a small clearing where we sat, silent, until from far off, then closer, and then so close that the sound seemed to be the voice of the very trees around us, a nightingale sang. We were there as part of Singing With Nightingales, an immersive experience run by another folk singer, Sam Lee. A few years ago, a group of friends and I followed Barbara Dickson, the Scottish pop star turned folk singer, into a wood deep in the green heart of Kent. ![]()
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