It felt like the folk music equivalent of Avengers Assemble. Last September, I found myself sitting at a wooden dining table in the Lake District with multiple superheroes of British folk. Karine Polwart, Kris Drever, Julie Fowlis, Beth Porter, Rachel Newton, Kerry Andrew, Jim Molyneux – could they really all exist in the same room together? Or would their convergence in a confined space cause a small black hole to open somewhere near the Keswick Tesco?
Karine, trying to find the beginnings of a shape for the performance we were planning, pulled out a notebook and asked people to say what they could play or do. Remarkable answers were modestly given; most people there had three instruments minimum, plus voice; all were also songwriters and composers. Rachel and Julie were bilingual in Gaelic and English; Karine and Kris sang in Scots. It came round to me. “Um … grade-one recorder? Backing kazoo? Also, I once sat on my brother’s oboe and broke it in half.”
WH Auden once compared being a poet in the company of scientists to being “a shabby curate in a roomful of bishops”. I had something of that shabby curate feeling in the Lakes that weekend. It didn’t help that I was sleeping in a room that had once been Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s study; no pressure for a writer, then. But it also thrilled me to be around musicians to whom I’d been listening for years, and to hear them responding to work of mine.
For the Avengers had assembled to develop a project called Spell Songs – a folk-musical adaptation of The Lost Words, by me and the artist Jackie Morris. The subtitle of The Lost Words is A Spell Book; it was our attempt to make what Jackie calls “a beautiful protest” against the depletion of the natural world that is under way quietly and hourly all around us. The “lost” words of the book’s title are 20 of the names for everyday nature that are slipping from daily speech and knowledge, to the extent that they were dropped from a widely read children’s dictionary due to under-use. Those words form a crooked almost A-to-Z, from “Acorn” through to “Wren” by way of “Bluebell”, “Kingfisher”, “Lark” and “Otter”, among others.
For each word, I wrote a summoning spell-poem to be spoken aloud by the reader, seeking to conjure these common names back into the mouth and the mind’s eye. “Otter enters water without falter – what a supple slider out of holt and into water”, starts the Otter spell. “This shape-shifter’s a sheer breath-taker, a sure heart-stopper, but you’ll only ever spot a shadow-flutter, bubble-skein, and never (almost never) actual otter.” Jackie, a magician of watercolour and pencil, painted first the creature or plant’s absence, then its reappearance as an icon set glowingly on gold leaf, and lastly its full restoration to the habitat of which it is part.
At first I thought we were making The Lost Words for children, but early on Jackie told me (she brooks little dispute) that it was a book for people of all ages – and she has, as usual, been proved right. The wild life of The Lost Words continues to amaze us daily. Grassroots campaigns have so far raised money to place copies of the book in every primary and special school in all of Scotland, half of England and a quarter of Wales. The book is used by charities and carers working with dementia sufferers, with refugees, with survivors of domestic abuse, with childhood cancer patients, and with people in terminal care. It has been adapted for dance, outdoor theatre, avant-garde classical music, and thousands of school projects. A copy is now in every hospice in the country, and the new Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore has four levels decorated floor to ceiling with Jackie’s art – the book become a building. The Lost Words has also been spray-painted by graffiti artists all over a substation in woods near Cardiff; book-as-building in a rather different way.
And as Spell Songs it is shifting shape again – into a folk music concert and album. Though I myself possess all the musical abilities of a deckchair, I love collaborating as a writer with musicians. I worked with the Australian Chamber Orchestra on the 2017 film Mountain, and I am finishing a project called Upstream with the German composer Hauschka, tracing the course of a river against the flow of current, up to its source on a mountain’s summit. A protest ballad called Heartwood that I wrote in defence of Sheffield’s street trees was recently set and sung by a community choir under an ancient Sheffield elm threatened with felling.
It makes sense to me that folk music might arise from The Lost Words. Jackie’s art hums, flickers and buzzes with the movements and noises of nature. I wrote the spells above all to be sounded out. And the folk tradition’s long double allegiance to landscape and protest aligns precisely with the book’s own purposes. There’s nothing nostalgic or “hey nonny nonny” about the musicians involved in Spell Songs. Karine Polwart’s 2016 album A Pocket of Wind Resistance is a genre-breaking, form-crossing, beautiful-furious minor masterpiece that exists also as a dramatic performance and a Faber & Faber play text. Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita’s Clarach, played on the kora, evokes the flight pattern of a bird – the osprey – that migrates from central southern Africa to Britain and back.
I’ve been troubled as well as heartened by the way our unassuming acorn of a book should have grown into such a wildwood. It is clear to me that the response is about far greater forces and feelings than just a book. We are living through an age of loss, for which we are only just starting to find a language of grief. Extinction and extirpation are under way at frightening speed in the landscapes on our doorsteps. What Michael McCarthy chillingly calls “the great thinning” is accelerating. Loss – of language, species, loved places – is the tune of the times.
After we’d finished that first planning session around the kitchen in Keswick, we sat round an open fire, and the musicians took out their instruments and began – surprisingly shyly – to play. It was a hell of a private concert; Kris Drever’s storytelling Scapa Flow, Rachel Newton shimmering away on her harp, Julie Fowlis singing eerie selkie songs in Gaelic … I’d crept out to the kitchen when the high notes of Beth Porter’s cello began to curl through the house. They wrapped around my heart and drew me back to the room. I sat on the floor and listened to her sing a song called Room for Thre’, about two parents and a baby afloat in a vessel on turbulent water, her voice soaring and swooping to weave a fragile song of fear for what might be lost, and a strong song of hope for what might be kept safe.
• Spell Songs Live is at Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk, 8 February; Birmingham Town Hall, 9 February; Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, 10 February; and Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 12 February.
