The Peregrine
A diary of a single winter on the Essex marshes and estuaries in which Baker follows a pair of wintering peregrine falcons day after day, recording the pursuit in feverish, image-dense prose. Distilled from a decade of obsessive watching, it became the cult classic of modern nature writing. (Page count is the NYRB Classics paperback, ISBN 9781590171332, introduction by Robert Macfarlane.)
Seven months of dated entries: the hawk stoops, the hawk kills, the hawk roosts, then does it again in different weather. Baker had a decade of notebooks to arrange and still built no arc, so a reader is left wanting "some narrative rather than diary entries in which only the seasons really changed." That puts the whole load on the sentences: "I found the emotional register of this book to be monotonous, and the prose to be overwrought." Every sky gets its metaphor and every stoop gets three, and "The imagery is a bit too much for my taste" comes from a reader who liked it. At that pitch the lyricism stops landing: "lines that say approximately the same thing, even if those lines are lyrical."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
