Sam John

I have approached J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine with the same consuming will that possessed the author as he followed the falcon. The work has materialised as a piece of literary criticism, giving equal weight to moments of close reading as to explorations of larger poetic, geographical and historical themes. As well as discovering material at the J.A. Baker Archive, I read extensively across ecocriticism and into poets and writers whose work I found traces of in Baker’s construction of prose. I have placed Baker as an intense reader who found his raisond'être, his writing material, in the Essex landscape and the sight of its wintering peregrines. In the final chapter, there is a marked shift in tone and form. Here, I recount an obsessive reading I undertook, drawing on the processes of the reading itself to create a sense of unity between myself and the text. This involves the workings of an active mind, where memory and imagination are recorded as both legitimate, and intimate, responses to the work.