Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

those writers and artists for whom northerliness is a mode of perception as well as a geographical position: Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North (1689); Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (1995), with its armoured bears and cold that bites to the bones; Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf (1963); Ezra Pound’s translations of classical Chinese frontier poems; the boreal phases of Eric Ravilious’s art; the maps and type-works of Alec Finlay; the fiction of the Hebridean sailor and storyteller Ian Stephen; Margaret Atwood’s explorations of ‘the malevolent north’; W. H. Auden’s poems of jetties, night-sailings and the simmer-dim … Most powerfully, though, and for years now, I have been drawn to the northern prose of Barry Lopez, which I first met in 1997, the year I turned twenty-one.