Book review: Archipelago is a glorious compendium of nature writing

A prevailing current in the volume is the prose and poetry of the Welsh writer Andrew McNeillie whose timeless observations course through these pages like a lost river.

A detail of ‘Inishbofin Moonshot’, a painting by Andrew McNeillie which appears with an essay by James Macdonald Lockhart in ‘Archipelago: A Reader’.

Metaphor is the only way we really have of understanding the world, to paraphrase the great Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Something is like this or it is like that. A good metaphor instantly conveys an image of the true essence of a thing. Archipelago has a cabinet full of such metaphors relating to landscape and nature and some are right out of the top drawer.

Perched on the clifftops of the Shetlands observing the serenade of the arctic terns and the harangue of the blackbirds, the naturalist and radio producer Tim Dee spies gannets plunging into the turbulent sea: “Every time it is like viewing a fresh marvel in a new world: their visible-decision making, with its corrective twisting and corkscrewing, the rapid origami of themselves, and then the brilliant white match strikes, fizzing into the water at 60mph to leave puffs of lit sea spray”.