Raising a Leveret, Connecting to Cowper

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

At the top of the show, I mentioned a book I’m really excited about.

It’s a memoir by British writer Chloe Dalton, and it’s called Raising Hair, H A R E.

At the beginning of the book, Dalton is a hard charging political speech writer in London.

She travels all over the world at a moment’s notice, but during COVID, she’s stuck in a small home in the countryside.

And one cold day she’s out walking along a dirt road and she chances upon a tiny creature in the middle of it.

And she writes The animal no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short silky ears held tightly against its back.

Its fur was dark brown, thick.

Long pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle.

Set against the bare earth and dry grass, it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began.

It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely And when she returns hours later, that little creature is still there and their birds of prey circling overhead, so she’s torn about whether to let nature take its course, and then against her better judgment, she scoops it up in a handful of dry leaves and heads home.

Now this little leveret weighs less than an apple.

And of course, once she gets it home, she thinks, oh my gosh, what have I done?

What do I do?

An expert tells her that most leverets in captivity either die of shock or starve, and the books that she finds about hares are mostly about hunting or cooking them.

But she finds answers oddly enough in a 250-year-old poem.

In the late seventeen hundreds, the poet William Cowper kept hares as pets and he wrote about them and what they ate, and so she tries feeding the leveret, what he suggests porridge, oats, and coriander, and improbably this little animal begins to thrive, and she goes on to read lots of natural history and folklore involving hares, and her memoir is rich with all of that information.

But she’s always mindful of the need to respect the fact that this is a wild animal.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

So she’s careful not to name it or pet it or assume its gender.

Instead, she adjusts her life so that the growing leveret has the run of her house and her garden.

And this memoir is a meditation on nature and our relationship to it, for better and for worse.

It’s about slowing down and observing.

And surprisingly, there’s also this quiet underlying amount of suspense through it.

You get invested in this question of will the animal survive?

Because after all, this is nature in the natural world for all its beauty, can also be grim.

But there’s some absolutely gorgeous writing to savor here and and for me it changed the way that I think about hairs, I think about leverettes.

And you know, Grant, there are a few books that I want to read all over again right away, and this is one of them.

Yes, you’ve been forcing this book on everyone.

It’s my turn is next.

Thank you so much, Martha, for sharing this lovely book with us.

We will link to Raising Hair by Chloe Dalton on our website at waywordradio.org.

And as always, Martha and I love to hear what you’re reading.

Send it along and email words@waywordradio.org or tell us on the telephone, call or text 877-929-9673 in the US and Canada.