Time Song
Searching for Doggerland
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE AND THE HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE
A journey told through stories and songs into Doggerland, the ancient region that once joined the east coast of England to Holland
Time Song tells of the creation, the existence and the loss of a country now called Doggerland, a huge and fertile area that once connected the entire east coast of England with mainland Europe, until it was finally submerged by rising sea levels around 5000 BC.
Julia Blackburn mixes fragments from her own life with a series of eighteen 'songs' and all sorts of stories about the places and the people she meets in her quest to get closer to an understanding of this vanished land. She sees the footprints of early humans fossilised in the soft mud of an estuary alongside the scattered pockmarks made by rain falling eight thousand years ago. She visits a cave where the remnants of a Neanderthal meal have turned to stone. In Denmark she sits beside Tollund Man who, despite having lain in a peat bog since the start of the Bronze Age, seems to be about to wake from a dream...
'This book is a wonder' Adam Nicolson, Spectator
'A clairvoyant and poetic conversation with the past' Antony Gormley
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What people think is lost never entirely leaves, posits novelist and biographer Blackburn (The Emperor's Lost Island) in this lyrical exploration of Doggerland, the country that until 6,000 years ago connected Britain with mainland Europe and now lies under the North Sea. Alternating chapters of prose with prose-poems she calls "time songs," Blackburn creates an impressionistic picture of a place that is both gone and yet still there, its landscape partly intact beneath the waves. "Trying to see through the fact of absence is what this book is mostly about," writes Blackburn, who also reflects on the recent loss of her beloved husband. Along the way, she visits with experts on Doggerland related to the Danish word dag, meaning "dagger," which also gave the dogwood its name and hikes through countryside near her home in England and elsewhere that resembles what Doggerland may have been like: icy in the winter, marshy in the summer. Like one of the scientists she meets on her quest, Blackburn believes life is a process that "does not begin with birth or end with death," but "is a trajectory in which there is no finite end." This sweet, sad book will leave its readers meditating on loss and timelessness.
