![]() ![]() ![]() In her previous book, the award-winning memoir H Is for Hawk, Macdonald writes of training a goshawk (notoriously intractable birds) while grieving the loss of her father. She so successfully achieves her goal, we wander around Vesper Flights amazed by flocks of songbirds migrating over the Empire State Building or a swift whose mouth is so large, it “turns the bird into something uncomfortably like a miniature basking shark.” Macdonald’s aim was to replicate the experience of Wunderkammer in her book. ![]() These were ornamental display cabinets, similar to Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, filled with “natural and artificial things together on shelves in close conjunction,” like coral, fossils, miniature paintings, tiny instruments. In the introduction to Helen Macdonald’s new collection of nature essays, Vesper Flights, she describes a trend in sixteenth-century European palaces and halls-Wunderkammer. ![]()
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