The Place of Tides
Are we in for a magnificent obsession and a baggy monster of a book that shouldn’t really work but somehow does? The perhaps surprising answer is: we are ... His prose is deceptively unvarnished with flashes of colour: bright birds’ eggs in a well-found barn. Our best observers of the world around us are farmers, not only Rebanks but John Lewis-Stempel—nature writers with dirt under their fingernails ... With the patience of a man making his rounds of birds’ nests, Rebanks shows that degradation of the environment happens in small ways and faraway places, too.
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A book of stillness, quiet, vigilance, and the kind of patience that is measured not in hours but in lifetimes ... A tender, diaristic, inevitably elegiac account of his apprenticeship with Anna and her friend Ingrid ... Each phase in this arcane process is meticulously described ... From the precision of these descriptions an exquisite, limpid beauty gradually emerges.
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A quietly profound book. It is a story about a still-essential way of living in the modern world and finding a way to keep going. It is also a deft travelogue to one of the world’s wildest seascapes ... He has carved out a voice that presents an unfiltered picture of rural life but also one that recognises a deep desire to connect to something bigger than ourselves. He does so again in The Place of Tides ... It is fair to say that The Place of Tides covers a niche subject, but Rebanks’s modest and assured narrative paints a picture of a wondrous world. It is one that few of us will ever visit but are all the better for knowing about.
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