Book Review: ‘The Nature of Seeing’ by Mark Cocker

As someone working on a book about looking at the world through Darwin’s eyes, it came as no surprise that I fully enjoyed reading Mark Cocker’s thoughts on the different but complementary ways in which we can attend to nature. This is a fantastic book.

Cocker begins with a thought-provoking chapter on how the act of seeing is far from passive, affecting how we view the world in future, and how seeing the natural world helps us appreciate that we are a part of nature, not apart from it.

Each of the subsequent eight chapters is dedicated to a different aspect of seeing the natural world, including seeing something for the first time; seeing on your local patch; seeing through experienced eyes after long familiarity; seeing by listening; and seeing with a sense of wonder. Each chapter begins with a short essay on that particular aspect of seeing, which is then illustrated with ten short pieces, most of them taken from Cocker’s many contributions to the Guardian newspaper’s long-running Country Diary column.

Of particular interest to me was the chapter entitled To See: To Imagine, in which Cocker describes looking at the natural world in ‘the most precise, faithful and scrupulous way’, contrasting it with the more ‘Romantic’ visions of nature criticised as ‘fancies’ by the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like Cocker and Coleridge, I prefer the former: what Cocker usefully describes as ‘the poetry of fact’.

If you enjoy ‘nature writing’—whatever that difficult term might mean—you will certainly enjoy this wonderful (and wonder-full) book.

Disclosure: Mark Cocker provided some lovely blurb for my book On the Moor. I have since met him a couple of times and consider him a personal friend.