Otter Country by Miriam Darlington

Miriam Darlington is a poet, and like all good poets, through awareness, attention, and observation, she has got under the skin of the otter

Otter Country – in search of the wild otter
By Miriam Darlington 
Granta Books
ISBN: 978-1847084859
Reviewed by Shaun Lambert

This is the first book I have reviewed that I am still reading and re-reading. Also I am reading it slowly and reverently. There are not many books that you can do this with.

Miriam Darlington is a poet, and like all good poets, through awareness, attention, and observation, she has got under the skin of the otter. Miriam, along with all poets and nature writers, is mindful of nature, and demonstrates that mindfulness is a universal human capacity.  

Her words melt the padlocks of your mind and suddenly you are free to slip into the book as the otter slips into the river or the sea.  

What she is doing is something older than ecology or therapy. Her word-pictures have the fearless and reverential attention of the cave-paintings from our early ancestors. She shows that our earliest seeing is still an innate capacity within us. This earliest seeing is watching the wild, whilst being part of it.

As human beings we have been made from the dust of the wilderness and some argue we have lost that sense of self which is in touch with our inner wildness, as we have lost touch with the earth itself. She builds an I-Thou relationship with the otters she encounters, rather than the I-It in the history of otter-hunts, and in that I-Thou moment that lost self and bond with the earth is restored.

The quality of her attentiveness draws our fragmented and anaesthetised senses into an integrated whole, in a kind of alchemic healing. Her words become the otters, and rivers and sea into which we can melt. There is a contagious wildness, wakefulness and health in the pilgrimage she makes around the country tracking the elusive otter.    

The way she describes the otters she witnesses to are among the most beautiful words I have read, and move me to tears. You have to be still to see the still moving otter, and the author breathes that stillness into the reader’s world and it pulsates with the wild.

The importance of her noticing can be found in a simple observation she makes, ‘Up and down the banks are the complex root systems of ash trees, which otters particularly love to use as holts as they provide hidden shelter and easy access to the water.’ (p.175)

Ash trees and otters live together.

Her book has the force of a mystical showing. Whenever I need a healing walk in my mind, I pick it up and read.

Shaun Lambert is an author and minister of Stanmore Baptist Church