Kathleen JamieAnmeldelser

Although Surfacing is only the second book by [[Kathleen Jamie]] I've read, she's already become one of my favourite essayists and guides to the all too often unseen world around us.

Starting in a cave in the West Highlands, a cave where bone sfrom a bear that lived 45,000 years ago were found, she contemplates the changes in topography since then. Ice ages have come and gone twice. the last one 10,000 years ago. In "the great scheme of things", are we living through "a warm bank holiday weekend" before the glaciers return, or will the earth continue to heat up as Jamie seems to believe?

What the retreat of ice and glaciers has revealed are traces of past cultures, surfacing after hundreds of years. Two of the essays here each capture a village recently revealed, but only for now, both under threat from coastal erosion and wind: Quinhagak Alaska, a village by the Bering Sea, the other a Neolithic farming community in Orkney. Jamie's explorations are usually in the north, "a place of entrancing desolation".

Jamie has been called the leading Scottish poet of her generation. Words and their meaning are critical to her. She contemplates a remark about the early Neolithic farmers, knowing they were only a step away from the wild: I began to wonder what it might have meant to them then, back when 'wild' was a new idea. Did stories linger of a way of life before farming, before cattle raising and sheep? Did 'the wild' thrill them, darkly? Shame them?

Who were the people who lived in these places? What happened to them? These aren't new thoughts, but Jamie builds on them:

By now we number in our billions, have built mega-cities with instant global communications, and send spacecraft to explore unknown shores. We can live to be eighty, ninety, a hundred years old! You early farmers were a success beyond measure. But {now} millions shrink in poverty. Others build high walls and fabricate missiles. Sea levels rise, storm winds are bearing down on us. We are becoming ashamed of our own layer - plastic and waste.

There are other essays here, more personal, from Jamie's own life. How to bring the sound of your grandmother's voice to the surface? a trek to Tibet aborted at the border because how could you know about Tienanmen in a pre internet age? Later there is the death of her father. With each essay another layer is added to the accumulation of her own life, a life these wanderings are simultaneously building and revealing for her.

It's difficult to convey a sense of Jamie's rootedness and introspection, her connection to the earth and the wild, so the best thing to do is just read her and discover it for yourself.

I'm so glad to have found Kathleen Jamie - I really love her writing. Another great series of essays.

Excellent prose on natural world observations.

Sightlines still my favourite but loved a lot of these pieces - been re-reading a lot of them or just dipping in, which is why it's taken so long to finish.

Read this in the right place - a log cabin miles from Roy Bridge, which is miles from anywhere, with a log burning stove and dogs to walk. Borrowed it from the library for holiday reading and will probably have to buy myself a copy although the writing is so sharp that I can almost imagine I know some of the pieces by heart. Every page is interesting and both brings something new and joins it to my own experience.

I have enjoyed it - but the poetry in English doesn't slice the world open the way the prose in Sightlines does. There is something about the rhythm and rhyme that is too bland. Looking back over the book I find the poems I really want to read again are mostly in Scots not English where somehow both rhyme and rhythm find a cutting edge - so an extra star for them.

Moon

Why did I read it? When "Findings" was first released, it received favourable reviews, some particularly glowing. It went on my wishlist, but I never seemed to get around to reading it.

During lockdown, I have sought to sift through my books, and add some Kindle editions of books I had wanted to read, and "Findings" was at the top of my list.

What did I like about it? Each chapter was a new story; each story was a revelation. Kathleen Jamie has a poetic style to her writing, but also a particular eye on her environment, one I had not seen through before. Each sentence seemed like a new discovery.

The illustrations preceding each chapter were enjoyable, too.

This was a short, but pleasurable read. I have the feeling I will delve into this book again, from time to time.

What didn't I like about it? Not a single thing. Not even the descriptions of the Surgeon's Hall.

Would I recommend it? This is a very short review, because I feel the book has to be experienced rather than written about by someone as word poor as myself. It is an utterly charming journey that should be experienced by all. Get it! Read it!

Life feels like one headlong rush at times. The phone squeaks constantly with notifications, demanding attention now, the 24 hour news fills our lives with politics and despair and yet time goes no faster than it did 5000 years ago. It grinds ceaselessly on, covering memories and objects with its gossamer-thin seconds. To go back in time, we need to unearth our landscapes and memories.

Time is a spiral. What goes around comes around.

The book opens with her in Alaska helping at an archaeological dig in a Yup’ik village. The site is normally frozen most of the year, but in the summer the cold relents, normally allowing the top four or five inches to be uncovered, however, climate change means that the permafrost is thawing to a depth of half a metre allowing more secrets of its hunter-gatherer past to be revealed. The objects that they are finding are enabling the village to re-discover their past. They found dance masks that were discarded after missionaries told them it was devil worship and for the first time in a very long time performed a dance that was pieced together from the elder’s memories.

The landscape was astonishing. There was nothing I wanted to do more than sit quietly and look at it, come to terms with its vastness.

Her next excursion to the past is at the Links of Noltland, up in Orkney. This Neolithic site has been covered by dunes and what they have found here was last seen by human eyes thousands of years ago. The need to excavate and understand just what is there, is urgent as it is subject to erosion from the storms that the Atlantic brings, as well as the other pressure of funding to carry out the work being stopped because of budget pressures. These people were only a step away from the wild and had short brutal lives and yet they were skilled enough to have devised a method when they built their homes to keep out the relentless wind.

They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again.

Jamie writes of time spent in Xiahe in Tibet in her younger days, at the time of the student protests and the clampdown of martial law in the region and the palpable tension in the area. They explore as much as they can, but because they are foreigners, they have an undue amount of attention directed towards them, including the inevitable night raid by the police. There are other essays in here too, almost short interludes between the longer pieces. She stops her car to watch the mastery an eagle has over the air and consider the timelessness of a woodland. Some of the essays are more personal too, she recalls the moment of her fathers passing and struggles to hear her mother and grandmothers voices in her mind.

A new Kathleen Jamie book is a thing of joy, and Surfacing does not disappoint at all. Her wonderful writing is layered, building images of the things that she sees, until you the reader, feel immersed in the same place that she inhabited. Some of the essays are very moving, Elders in particular, but also The Wind Horse where you sense the tension in the town from what she observes. Her skill as a poet means, for me at least, that her writing has a way of helping you seen the world around in a new and different light, revealing as much from the shadows as from the obvious and this book is no different.

As with all books that are written by poets, this is a delight to read. The language is eloquent and lyrical, without being pretentious.

She takes us, through a series of essays, on a journey to places in the far north of the UK and Scandinavia. To islands and museums and more importantly to the part of the mind that communicates with nature.

Well worth reading. Shall be reading some of her other books

There is something about the way that Jamie writes that captivates and immerses you in the subject that she writes about.

This book is no exception to that.

The subject, or short essays, that are in this book are not exclusively about the natural world, but most are. As she writes on the matter at hand, I feel her passion and her strengths, her weakness and doubts, and all the time I am amazed by the attention to detail that she has in her prose. It doesn't seem to make any difference whether she is writing about peregrines or her husbands fever, you feel alongside, seeing the things that she has seen, feeling the wind and smelling the sea.

This is effortless, exquisite reading.

The more that I read of Kathleen Jamie’s work the more I grow to like her writing. I have previously read Findings and Sightlines and thought that they were superb, but I have never read any of her poetry before.

The Overahul is a collection of poems about the thing we sometimes miss in our busy lives.

Some of these were very good indeed. There are a couple in Gaelic or dialect that I could not comprehend, but mostly they were good. My particular favourite was The Lighthouse. What is really impressive though is her mastery of language, she can convey an image with sparkling clarity with a breathtaking brevity, and that is what makes this a delight to read.

I have been looking forward to reading this book since I read its equally brilliant sequel/companion piece Sightlines last year. Jamie brings a quiet poetic eye to her observations of both the natural world and modern humanity, making many intriguing connections.

She succeeds in making a beautiful and unified whole from essays on a very varied set of subjects, ranging from the nature of darkness, birdwatching, remote uninhabited Scottish islands, the view from Edinburgh's Calton Hill and a museum of surgical specimens, to name just a few, while making perceptive observations on the connections with her own life.

Sightlines still my favourite but loved a lot of these pieces - been re-reading a lot of them or just dipping in, which is why it's taken so long to finish.

This, Jamie’s latest book of poetry, won the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award for 2016.

There are 47 poems here of which only two stretch over 1 page in length. Most take the form, if not the formal structure, of a sonnet, though Soledades has eight lines of what look like prose before opening out in its last three lines. Some are very short indeed. The last, Gale, has only 16 syllables, shorter than a haiku. The longest, Another You, bears out the potency of cheap music, the titular deer in The Hinds are “the bonniest companie”. Ben Lomond refers to the bonny banks in a poem which, like the song containing those lines, is about death and remembrance. 23/9/14 is an injunction to gird up again after the Scottish Independence Referendum. High Water compares ocean tides to an adulterous affair, Scotland’s Splendour scopes out the delights of memories from a book stumbled on in a charity shop, Wings Over Scotland is a litany of the recorded deaths of birds of prey on various landed estates, taken - verbatim it would seem - from the original reports.

The language Jamie uses goes from standard English to various degrees of Scots depending on the poem. Migratory II, (eftir Hölderlin) is the most uncompromisingly Scottish. The prevalence of poems about animals or landscape places Jamie’s poetry firmly within the tradition of Scottish literature.

A slim volume of poems, salt-sprayed and moonlit islands.
too many flavours to pick a favourite, but the poem that speaks to me most today is Avowal:

... 'Flower,'
they whisper, 'd' you love
the breeze that wantons
the whole earth round

breathing its sweet proposals,
but does not love you?'
- then laughs when your blue
head nods: I do. I do

A luminously reflective book, which brings together some fairly disparate subject matter into a unified whole. Jamie recounts a variety of experiences - an archaeological dig, various trips to remote Scottish islands such as St Kilda and Rona, a visit to a pathology department and an extraordinary section on the Hvalsalen (whale hall) of Bergen museum. She finds startlingly new and perceptive observations on all of these. A memorable and deeply rewarding read.

This was accessible and quick to read, although the ideas described will not be so fast to assimilate. It is fascinating what clues there are to navigation that we overlook. The amount of information available can be staggering, but it takes practice to master the techniques required. It has opened my eyes to the possibilities, even though I'm unlikely to be venturing off into the wilderness without the relevant equipment just yet.

Read this in the right place - a log cabin miles from Roy Bridge, which is miles from anywhere, with a log burning stove and dogs to walk. Borrowed it from the library for holiday reading and will probably have to buy myself a copy although the writing is so sharp that I can almost imagine I know some of the pieces by heart. Every page is interesting and both brings something new and joins it to my own experience.

I have enjoyed it - but the poetry in English doesn't slice the world open the way the prose in Sightlines does. There is something about the rhythm and rhyme that is too bland. Looking back over the book I find the poems I really want to read again are mostly in Scots not English where somehow both rhyme and rhythm find a cutting edge - so an extra star for them.

http://wineandabook.com/2014/05/14/review-sightlines-by-kathleen-jamie-readwomen...

“That’s what we see. What we listen to, though, is silence. Slowly we enter the most extraordinary silence, a radiant silence. It radiates from the mountains, and the ice and the sky, a mineral silence which presses powerfully on our bodies, coming from very far off. It’s deep and quite frightening, and makes my mind seem clamorous as a goose. I want to quell my mind, but I think it would take years.” (4)

I love reading about nature and the environment, but I’m fairly hopeless when it comes to the complexities of the sciences. Math has never been my strong suit, and as soon as any scientific article veers into the land of formulas and equations, I can already feel my heart start racing and the tears welling up in my eyes. When my high school physics teacher announced to my class one day that most people did OK one our latest assignment save a few who, in his opinion, had the scientific insight of a pile of leaves waiting to be raked in his backyard, he was referring to me (unfortunately, a true story). For these reasons, I tend to gravitate toward more lyrical than strictly academic writing on the sciences, which is why I love Kathleen Jamie.

Jamie’s work reminds me a lot of the work of Elizabeth Kolbert, whose environmental journalism strikes the perfect balance between the narrative and the academic. In Sightlines, Jamie is able to take us to parts of the global off-limits to those of us who happen to not be field-biologists, archeologists, or millionaire travel enthusiasts. Within the span of 300+ pages, Jamie takes us to see the Aurora Borealis, to the remote archipelago of St. Kilda off the coast of Scotland, to the Hvalsalen (or Whale Hall) in the Bergen Natural History Museum of Norway. With each page and each essay, I kept thinking to myself “I absolutely picked the wrong career. I want to have that experience and write about that!”

What really drew me in to Jamie’s work was her gift for descriptive language. She has an ability to really paint a clear, vibrant, vivid picture of these amazing, remote places…and her prose! Perfect balance between the poetic and the academic. Comme ça:

“Gannets glitter. They’re made for vision, shine in any available light, available to see and be seen. Their eyes are round and fierce, with a rim of weird blue, and they are adapted to see down through the surface reflections of the sea. There, they take what they need–and what they don’t. Less patrician poet, more bargain-hunter. ‘A butter scoop, a battle-door, a golf-ball, some toy whips, some little baskets and a net- makers needle’ are just some of the oddities found in gannets’ nests,–but that quaint list was compiled a century ago, when an ornithologist called J.H. Gurney published an earnest, learned book called simply The Gannet. All that was then known of the bird’s history and natural history is there. A battledoor is a sort of tennis racket, and what would a gannet want with one of those? But the acquisitive habit continues, hence the shredded polyprop rope and nylon net. Sometimes the youngsters get entangled in this stuff, and die like that, hanged from their natal cliffs before they can fly.” (82-83)

Rubric rating: 8.5. Absolutely picking up Findings, Jamie’s other collection of environmentally/travel-themed essay collection.½

An interesting read. Jamie's prose is unhurried and soothing; her desire to understand the world around her inspirational. However, despite the mellow tone of this book, some of the subject matter is uncomfortable - particularly the essay about Surgeon's Hall.½

I’ll be honest. The first thing that attracted me to this book when I saw it on NetGalley was the cover. It’s a close up of a whale’s (not sure which kind) eye – it’s like it was made for me! Actually, it looks like Bryant Austin’s work, which is absolutely amazing and should be checked out. (Whoa, just researched and found that the cover image is, in fact, a photo by Austin!)

Sightlines is a book of essays about the natural world – at least, it bills itself as such. There were a few in there that I don’t know if I’d necessarily categorize that way, but overall, I think it meets the description. The book started out strong, with an essay about Jamie traveling in Iceland among the icebergs and catching the Aurora Borealis.

- "The next iceberg offers to the ship a ramp as smooth and angled as a ski jump. Just slide right up here, little ship, it seems to say, but the invitation is declined."

- "Another iceberg, and another. Some people say you can smell icebergs, that they smell like cucumbers. You can smell icebergs and hear your own nervous system. I don’t know. Although they pass slowly and very close, I smell nothing but colossal, witless indifference."

I really loved her description of watching the aurora, of the utter silence all around despite the “movement which ought to whoosh.” And the dearth of people despite the awe.

- "But: ‘Where is everyone else?’ I whisper. Aside from those few on the deck, the shapes of a few more people can be seen looking out from the windows of the bridge. The bridge, warm and reassuring with its competent officers and glowing green instruments. Where is everyone? My cabin mate clamps her arms to the sides of her goose-down jacket, stands rigid, and whispers in reply, ‘Perhaps they are asleep.’ She smiles as though she’d looked into the human condition some time ago, but has since moved on."

The next few essays were a little weird to me, not really my style. But her writing style kept me reading. Jamie is a Scottish author, and her essays are peppered with Scottish and English words – I was glad I was reading this on my Kindle because it was so easy to look up those unfamiliar words. Surprisingly, most if not all were in the dictionary as well!

The essays where she explored islands off the coast of Scotland, following birds, following whales, those were where my attention was piqued. And then the chapter on the Bergen Natural History Museum in which she visits the Hvalsalen – Whale Hall – to see the whale bones was my absolute favorite. I wish I could have been there with her, exploring the museum, climbing the skeletons, helping to clean them. I could almost smell the dust, the musty atmosphere, as I read. I usually try to get my favorite quotes, but I was so engrossed with that chapter that I didn’t stop to do that at all.

Overall I really enjoyed this book – it turned out different than I expected but that wasn’t a bad thing. If I had to describe it in one phrase, I’d call it natural history in a book.

A few more of my favorite quotes:

- "Once, I asked my friend John—half in jest—why we are so driven. By day John counsels drug addicts; by night he is a poet. He wrote back, half in jest: ‘You know, my job isn’t to provide answers, only more questions. Like: why are we not more driven? Consider: the atoms of you have been fizzing about for a bit less than five billion years, and for forty-odd of those years, they’ve been pretty well as self-aware as you. But soon enough they’ll go fizzing off again into the grasses and whatever, and they’ll never, ever know themselves as the sum of you again. That’s it. And you ask me why we’re driven? Why aren’t more folk driven? Whatever are they thinking about?’"

- "We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation."

- "The henge is gone, the director’s report is available to read, the photos are filed away, the Bronze Age woman’s bones—well, they’re in a cardboard box in a city store. The food vessel is reunited with its sister, and displayed in the National Museum, and has nothing to do with this place, this here."

On gannets:
- "They held their long beaks at every angle, like—paintings again—those portraits of aristocratic dynastic families, where everyone is elegant and looks into the distance, looks anywhere except at each other."

- "It was probably nothing, so I said nothing, but kept looking. That’s what the keen-eyed naturalists say. Keep looking. Keep looking, even when there’s nothing much to see. That way your eye learns what’s common, so when the uncommon appears, your eye will tell you."

- "The things we deem worth keeping, that is, as we seem to be the arbiters of so many fates. There are only 4000 blue whales alive now. At the time of their deliverance, the moratorium of the 1960s, we had slaughtered our way through 350,000."

- "There was a time—until very recently in the scheme of things—when there were no wild animals, because every animal was wild; and humans were few. Animals, and animal presence over us and around us. Over every horizon, animals. Their skins clothing our skins, their fats in our lamps, their bladders to carry water, meat when we could get it."

- "Stuart often said there was no such thing as ‘natural harmony’. It was a dynamic. Populations expand, then crash. Mysterious things happen—catastrophic things sometimes, on the island, everywhere. Nothing stays the same."

- "Perhaps if you were some sort of purist, if you carried a torch for ‘the wild’ and believed in a pristine natural world over and beyond us, you might consider it an intrusion to catch a bird, and make it wear a ring or a tag. Perhaps you’d consider that their man-made burden violates them in a way. I admit there was something uncomfortable about the metal ring, soldiering on while the bird’s corpse withered. But when I got the chart out, traced the route, measured the distance, and understood that yes, of course, on a southwest bearing, you could swoop via certain channels from the North Sea through to the Atlantic, on small dark wings, it was because this one ringed bird had extended my imagination. The ring showed only that it was wedded to the sea and, if anything, the scale of its journeyings made it seem even wilder than before."

Note: I received a review copy of this book from NetGalley. Quotes may be subject to change in the final version.