MacFarlane takes words that were dropped from children's dictionaries and creates poetic anagrams. Words like acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker, fern, heather were replaced with technological terms e.g. "cut and paste."Conker, the shiny dark nut encased within the green spiky fruit, was used in children's games throughout the British isles. The horse chestnut or "conker" has an odd shape and would be hard to duplicate. Thus, MacFarlane's anagram includes the question, "Cabinet-maker, could you craft me a conker? He decided that neither Cabinet-maker nor King nor engineer could make one.
He calls a dandelion a little "sun-of-the-grass," and a kingfisher a "colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker, river's quiver."
All of these descriptions are worked beautifully into an anagram stanzas and illustrated with oversized images by Jackie Morris. For "starling," he writes,
Should green-as-moss be mixed with
blue-of-steel be mixed with gleam-of-gold
you'd still fall short by far of the--
Tar-bright oil-slick sheen and
gloss of starling wing.
And if you sampled sneaker-squeaks
and car alarms and phone ringtones
you'd still come nowhere near the --
Rooftop riprap street-smart
hip-hop of starling song.
Let shade clasp coal clasp pitch
clasp storm clasp witch,
they'd still be pale beside the --
In-the-dead-of-night-black, cave-black,
head-cocked, fight-back gleam of starling eye.
Northern lights teaching shoaling fish teaching
swarming flies teaching clouding ink
would never learn the --
Ghostly swirling surging whirling melting
murmuration of starling flock.
The Lost Words is a visual and verbal treat.
