She is trying to pull the goshawk into her own dislocated world. Making the jesses, the leather straps that tether the hawk, she is trying to hold on, not letting go. Slowly the author loses her moorings and drifts away from everything: her job, her house, her bills, her friends, her self. Macdonald and other people, she becomes fixated on her task of taming the hawk, Mabel. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. Macdonald, already a keen falconer, drives from Cambridge, England, to a Scottish quay to buy a young goshawk from an Irishman just off the ferry from Belfast. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life, she writes. To categorize this work as merely memoir, nature writing or spiritual writing would understate her achievement. “But you feel it alone.” Yet in this remarkable, fraught book, she tries to convey her grief and mourning after her father’s sudden death.

It also borrows the logic of the genre, presenting its phantoms as tragic, but dangerous too. Grief, as Helen Macdonald explains in “H Is for Hawk,” is personal-the pain is not to be shared. When Helen Macdonalds father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. H Is for Hawk is a ghost story not just because of the mesmerizing ghost-tangle it convenes. It was very interesting, and sensitively portrayed.The Northern Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) is a nimble hunter able to navigate dense woods in pursuit of prey. In training her Goshawk chick, Helen partnered with another female falconer. They are magnificent birds and there's some beautiful shots of them in this programme. It was about to begin, writes Helen Macdonald in H Is for Hawk, a book filled with the elemental heft of hawks and the lingering bouquet of death. I found it very relaxing watching the scenes of a Goshawk nest in the wild, with the mother rearing her chicks. She has had a privileged life, but the programme showed the privilege she enjoys, being in such close contact with these birds. We were shown where she'd studied and kept a Goshawk at Cambridge University. The point was made that Falconry used to be the hobby of nobles and royalty. It wasn't just that though, as well as being a nature programme, I became aware that this was a middle-class lady doing this, a world away from 'Kes'. It followed Helen Macdonald as she trained a Goshawk, and focussed on the memories she had of training a Goshawk in the past, as a child, and how that had helped her to deal with the grief of losing her father.

I've just watched 'H is for Hawk: A New Chapter'. An ingenious blend of memoir and nature writing, an intelligent, multi-layered and humane work, H is for Hawk is one of my favourite books of the year.

H is for hawk by helen macdonald