Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land

What people think is lost never entirely leaves, posits novelist and biographer Blackburn (The Emperor’s Lost Island) in this lyrical exploration of Doggerland, the country that until 6,000 years ago connected Britain with mainland Europe and now lies under the North Sea. Alternating chapters of prose with prose-poems she calls “time songs,” Blackburn creates an impressionistic picture of a place that is both gone and yet still there, its landscape partly intact beneath the waves. “Trying to see through the fact of absence is what this book is mostly about,” writes Blackburn, who also reflects on the recent loss of her beloved husband. Along the way, she visits with experts on Doggerland—related to the Danish word dag, meaning “dagger,” which also gave the dogwood its name—and hikes through countryside near her home in England and elsewhere that resembles what Doggerland may have been like: icy in the winter, marshy in the summer. Like one of the scientists she meets on her quest, Blackburn believes life is a process that “does not begin with birth or end with death,” but “is a trajectory in which there is no finite end.” This sweet, sad book will leave its readers meditating on loss and timelessness. (Aug.)