“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?”

In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the spirit of a creature — a distinction between scientific fact and poetic truth, between ways of looking and styles of seeing, Ursula K. Le Guin would capture an epoch later with her astute observation that while both celebrate what they describe, science objectifies the universe by describing it from the outside, while poetry subjectifies it by describing it from the inside, and life is the land of subjects.

With her short, searing insistence on the subject in the specimen, Dickinson was warning us that despite all the facts we may discover about birds in the epochs to come — now we know how they fly and how they see and what they dream about — the truth about them, the poetic truth we may call spirit, will always remain elusive, irreducible, unreachable by means of reason, reachable only by love. A century after her, Rachel Carson — a scientist who wrote like a poet and sparked the modern environmental movement with her prophetic, poetic Silent Spring — would insist that an indestructible sense of wonder is our mightiest antidote to the silencing of the birds that augurs the erasure of nature. We forget, and need constant reminding, that the fruit of wonder as well as its fulcrum is not knowledge — none of our discoveries have kept three billion birds from vanishing between Carson’s lifetime and ours — but love.

It is love that radiates from the pages of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s exquisite Book of Birds (public library) — a passionate and rigorous subjectifying of the wonder of the winged, seven years in the making, part field guide and part ode, animated by an I/Thou relationship that implicates both reader and read by addressing each bird directly as a subject rather than explicating an object. In this luminous lacuna between conservation and consecration, what emerges is the spirit in the species, the numinous in the named, the isness in the itness.

The foreword casts the spell and hands the summons:

What is lost when birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, in their own splendour and right. And for humans — language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, lifts of the spirit, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place-makers, memory-keepers, calendars and clocks. They stitch the world’s parts together: earth to sky, river to woodland, mountain to sea, country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere.

In the tradition of their Lost Spells and Lost Words (one of my all-time favorite books), the lyrical essays — tender as a lullaby, urgent as a warning bell — are accompanied by almost unbearably beautiful paintings, emanating a portrait’s reverence for reality and an icon’s fidelity to the poetic truth beyond the material fact.

What David Whyte did for words, Robert Macfarlane has done for birds; what Rachel Carson said of the sea — “no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry” — can be said, must be said of birds, and no one has drawn out their poetry more truthfully, more tenderly than Robert Macfarlane, his rhythmic incantations summoning the birds one by one, subject by subject, in all their fierce, fragile wonder: the gannet, “graceful and precise as an equation”; the avocet, who “seen at sunset in silhouette seems blown of glass — as if a breath of wind would leave her in shards amid the reeds”; the bar-tailed godwit traversing six thousand miles between Alaska and Australia in “a single, epic super-flight”; the black-throated diver crying out his prehistoric “fog-born ululation”; the eider, who “can fly as fast as a cheetah can run” on wings feathered with fibers so delicate that they “make angora feel dense as lead”; the tawny owl, her eyes “pure night, two twelve-bore barrels, a pair of shadow planets.”

Punctuating these love letters to particular species are the seven wonders of the bird world — Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, and Migration — each essayed into a revelation between the scientific and the spiritual. Pulsating through it all is a beckoning to see the world in a bird more clearly in order to love it more deeply:

Noticing is the first step to naming; knowing the first step to knowing both things and the relations between things. Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change. But this is a fragile chain, easily broken — its links must be reforged and rejoined, over and over.

How lucky we are that there are still those unresigned people — stubborn enough, loving enough — who keep reforging and rejoining the chain with links more beautiful, more durable than we could have imagined, lustrous with that indestructible sense of wonder in which lies our only salvation, in which resounds our most everlasting song.