Of Poets, Philosophers, and Prophets
A Feature Review of
Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane
Hardcover: W.W. Norton & Company, 2025
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Reviewed by Erin Beasley
The language of poets, philosophers, and prophets pervades Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? The poetry flows across the first page:
“Twelve thousand years ago, a river is born.”
“In a hollow at the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes, water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk — and flows away. Rises and flows, rises and flows: for days, then years, then decades, then centuries, watched by a midsummer day-moon and a berry-red winter sun, watched in all weathers, watched by deer who stand six feet tall at the withers, watched by the sentries of hawk and fox, watched in sleet and hail, watched by aurochs eleven feet long from muzzle to tail” (3).
It streams across the last (not counting the glossary or the end notes or the selected resources and “acknowledgements and aftermaths”):
“Just two little pinches of ash each; this is a sensitive ecological site, after all. The first pinch is for the land: mud, beech leaves, tree roots.”
“Then one by one [the grown children] reach out over the pool where a river is born, and let the ash fall like snow onto the water’s surface, where the flakes begin to move together, drawn by undercurrents we cannot see.”
“Death and love and life, all mingled in the flow” (301).
Poetry, it seems, is one way to encounter and convey rivers. Macfarlane makes the point explicit when he connects poetry, water, and hope in the person of Rita, one of his guides. Of her, he says, “Rita … ‘speaks the language of hope’ — and that language is a watery one. Rivers flow through Rita’s poetry” (222).
Poetry, also, and perhaps always, reaches, and Macfarlane is doing nothing if not reaching, straining for language to describe what at times is indescribable. (Macfarlane’s language and its structures change in response to the bodies of land and water he visits.) Rita, a woman of wisdom if ever there was one, tries to prepare Macfarlane for the impossibility of describing what he sees and experiences. “Forget your notebooks,” she orders him, “on the river: leave them behind” (223).) And at one point, he does. Even as he pens—or attempts to—a description of the Gorge in one of his notebooks, the ink swirls across the page. Plumes of spray drench him and his words. Eventually, he ceases from observing the water before him and answers the river’s compulsion to draw near and be “rivered” (295).
This “rivering” occurs at the end of his three journeys to rivers around the world, as it must. Macfarlane turns to one of the oldest forms of literature in writing this book; he sets it up as a quest. The impetus is an innocent sounding idea with radical ramifications: “This book,” he says, “is a journey into an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive” (15).
So begins the author’s quest. He travels to three landscapes, where he meets three guides, all of whom offer wisdom like the sages and magicians found in epic poetry. The last is Rita, who tells Macfarlane to forget his notebooks and quit thinking so much with his head (223). The second, Yuvan, speaks of an important concept woven into the book: imagination. Yuvan says, “Barrenness is almost always a state of mind, rarely a state of land” (154). And the first, DeCoux, described as a self-marooned castaway “islanded in an immensity of forest” (70), offers a warning. “The moral of [my] cautionary tale is: if you want to do something, you’d better watch out, because you might just end up doing it for the rest of your life!” (71).
MacFarlane doesn’t hide the quest-like nature of his book; he references epics throughout it. He also gives Gilgamesh as a gift to two of his guides, and when he gives a different book to the third, he still refers to Gilgamesh (69, 178, 226). Three gifts for three guides, along with gifts for the rivers and the land; three landscapes; three remembrances of the dead; three visits (four, if one counts an imagined future visit made by his children) to the spring near his home in England. He travels with companions, too, some of them the guides, as in Yuvan’s case, but typically other people who love the rivers and trees and fungi of the world. These people are not incidental as companions sometimes are in epic poetry; each offers MacFarlane a different way of seeing, hearing, and inhabiting the world. Each person changes him in some way, their flow crossing with his and shifting it to greater and lesser degrees.
If poetry is the language by which Macfarlane invites the reader into his experiences, then the questions and perspectives are, too. The questions, or more to the point, the question—is a river alive?—becomes a field of philosophical inquiry. It begins with the opposite question: “Has the water died?” Macfarlane’s nine-year-old son asks (10). And—the question pierces Macfarlane, as only a big question from a child to a parent can. The parent attempts assurances. “No, of course not,” replies Macfarlane (10). Yet on the page and to the reader he expresses his misgivings. “My certainty is a deceit,” (10) he writes.
Doubt, despair, and hope wind together in this book, at least for Macfarlane. But his guides and companions refuse to countenance the second. “Despair is a luxury,” says one. How can you not hope, says another, when “a river like that can cut a fucking mountain in half, a mountain made of the oldest, hardest rocks on the planet” (292)? Every time Macfarlane asks (if he asks—with some companions and guides the question is absurd to even consider) his guides and companions, “Is a river alive?” they answer with a resounding “yes.” Their answer begins to explain their deep devotion to the rivers, for if rivers are alive, then they can be endangered, they can be hidden, they can be murdered. They must be protected and cherished and above all, seen, listened to, and heeded.
Macfarlane embraces this posture of seeing, listening, and heeding. In each of his travels, he considers the “grammar of animacy,” a phrase not original to him but coined by Robin Wall Kimmerer and shared, if by different terms, by individuals like Lydia Millet, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Wendell Berry. What is the language here and here and here? Macfarlane asks himself. Each time, the answer differs. “The grammar must be specific to its substrate,” he says (107). In his first journey, to a cloud-forest in South America, he speaks of life in a “constant hyperdrive … an animist grammar of this place would need a syntax of hypotaxis … of maximum correlation, proliferating connections quaquaversally; a branching, foliate, fractal, super-furcating language structure” (107). India’s great and smaller rivers necessitate a different grammar. Here, “metaphor would be at its core, surely: the trope which transforms, joins like to unlike. It would need to be a grammar of the ecotone and the interzone, rich with transitives and reciprocities, trembling always on the brink; one in which flowing and knowing are indissoluble” (183). And the final landscape, the final river Macfarlane visits, the Mutehekau Shipu? Its “mode is, surely, purely flow … and its grammar of animacy is one of ands and throughs and tos and nows, of commas not full stops, of thens not buts, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings…” (289).
Macfarlane’s attempts at grammars exist between two questions his guides and companions ask. The first: Who speaks for the river? The question becomes increasingly persistent as Macfarlane considers the role of law in protecting rivers and living things. How can one draft a law to protect the river if the river’s needs and wants cannot be translated into an intelligible language? How does one begin to communicate with rivers and trees and fungi in a way that promotes flourishing of both the human and more-than-human world? These questions are not asked by the guides and companions; they reside between the first question and the second: “What does the river say?” (292). To speak for the river, Macfarlane concludes, requires active looking and listening, of paying attention and submitting agency to another force (256, 290). Without those things, one runs the danger of speaking what is untrue, of speaking more for humans and what they need from the water rather than what the water needs from humans.
This looking and listening—a state of active and ongoing perceptivity, receptivity, and activity—introduces the prophetic mode of the book. Macfarlane constantly calls himself and the readers to look, to listen, to, above all, pay attention. These calls come from within himself, as when he receives his son’s question or when he is tempted toward despair and dismay. They also come from outside himself. Macfarlane’s companions and guides all demand, either in words or their state of being, that he reconsider, reimagine, and reorder his usual modes of operating in the world. “How we imagine the matter of water matters,” he says (184). He also inhabits the planes of past, future, and the living present simultaneously, in much the same way that the Old Testament prophets did. Remember, they cry. Remember—and hope. Let the past and the future shape your present. Let them shift your gaze and change your perspective, along with your actions.
In these senses, Macfarlane employs what Walter Brueggemann would call the “prophetic imagination.” The prophets, argues Brueggemann, speak of “issues [that] are the same: the world we have trusted in is vanishing before our eyes and the world that is coming at us feels like a threat to us and we can’t quite see the shape of it.” In doing so, they hold the past and future in mind to speak compellingly to the present. They address their listeners with “fearless truth telling, fierce hope, and disarming language that can break through ‘human hearts and human hurt.’”
Macfarlane’s work excels in the prophetic mode. His book begins in the deep past: a river is born. It ends in an imagined future: his children come to bless the river and the land and him by depositing his ashes in the spring near his home. In the present—fearless truth telling, fierce hope in spite of doubt and despair, disarming language.
All of this—the attentive looking, listening, and heeding; the three streams of past, present, and future; and the “triple rhymes of life, death, and revival” (278)—come to a head when Macfarlane stands at the precipice of the Gorge, a final section of rapids on the Mutehekau Shipu. It cannot be traversed by kayak or canoe; it roars and devours like some monster out of The Odyssey. It can only be gazed at from a somewhat safe vantage point. There, on that precipitous edge, Macfarlane understands:
“I am looking into a mouth, an immense river-maw that pours between the jaws of the Gorge, and I see that this mouth has a tongue, a vast green-white tongue which tapers and glides to its tip right at my feet, and I hear speech is tumbling out of this mouth, has been tumbling out of it since the old ice left, and that this is a place where ghost-realms of times past and future overlap with one another, each transparent to the other, and I try to peer right and left into these laminar worlds but the river-mouth and its river-voices hold me in this one here …” (294).
Here, in the fragile present, where hope sometimes is a thing with feathers. But sometimes, it is an overwhelming, awe-inspiring river. And sometimes, sometimes, it is an ancient tiny spruce “growing among grass and myrtle, in a handkerchief-size pocket of earth lichen that the wind has gathered on the camel’s hump of bedrock on which I’m standing. … It is a miniature World Tree. It is l’arbre sacré. It is resistance” (283–284).
So resist. The world as it is does not have to remain as it is. It can be changed—by law, and by imagination. Look at the world and all its wonders. Listen to what they have to say. Be amazed. Seek their good, for in their good flourishing is abundant hope and overflowing life for both the human and more-than-human.
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