Even If

It had poured and was still raining in Lady Katharine’s Wood. Late evening and the days were waning. Matting protected fresh growth underfoot. Umbrella furled, I trod carefully, intent on the path’s end and a signal to bleep back to my blocked BlackBerry, when trees relayed a sound – half rustle,...

‘Proceeding Without a Map’: Kathleen Jamie and the Lie of the Land

This chapter explores questions of poetic territory in Jamie’s poetry, with particular focus on Jizzen, The Tree House and The Overhaul. Wheatley considers Jamie’s political and historical poems, and their refusal to align poetic map-making with nation-building projects. Her poems about Scottish landmarks imaginatively explore local histories, rather than presuming to overturn them. She is aware of the complexities of land-ownership in Scotland and her poems make no claims of ownership of Romantic bowers or forest groves. In a distinct refusal of the bardic self-aggrandizements of Yeats or English Romantic poets, Jamie celebrates provisional sheltering spaces found on cliff-sides or coast-lines. Poetic territory remains provisional, just as political-cultural arrangements of landscape prove transient, in Jamie’s recent poetry.

Kathleen’s Scots

This assesses Kathleen Jamie's use of Scots across a range of her poetry, but it also has some qualities of a personal tribute by a fellow contemporary poet. Beginning with a discussion of Jamie's collection, The Autonomous Region, Crawford assesses the use of Scots elsewhere in her work. Particularly striking, for example, are her translations of Hölderlin into Scots, in her recent collection, The Overhaul.

‘We Do Language Like Spiders Do Webs’: Kathleen Jamie and Michael Longley in Conversation

Michael Longley writes of Jamie: 'She has perfect pitch, a natural sense of cadence and verbal melody that helps to give her work the feel of organic inevitability'. Longley flies close to the heart of his own work, revealing their shared aesthetic practice, central to which is the idea of poetry as dialogue. This chapter tunes in to Longley and Jamie as poets in conversation with each other, across boundaries of nation, time and space, and not merely at the level of shared subject matter, but more profoundly at the level of poetic technique and formal concerns. Both are poets of the singing line and both are shifting, sea-faring poets crossing sound- and sight- lines in their endless probings of words and worlds. Both engage with and extend the limits of the lyric, in particular the sonnet form, and in the work of both the energies of translation lie at the core of the artistic enterprise. Jamie and Longley see into the life of poetry as an act of conversation, an art of conversion.

‘The Tilt from One Parish to Another’: The Tree House and Findings

This chapter addresses the questions of how humans interact with the natural landscape and the status of poets – as opposed to scientists and activists – in this interaction. It focuses on the recent poetry of Kathleen Jamie in the context of contemporary ecocriticism and prose non-fiction accounts of Scottish ‘nature’ and especially the ‘wild’, including Jamie’s own Findings and Sightlines and the work of Robert McFarlane and Alasdair MacIntosh. The essay will address the extent to which our relationship with the environment is –problematically – portrayed as one of communion or community, and whether this is a re-emergence of (Utopian) versions of the pastoral, in which ‘nature’ is always already destroyed or necessarily forever beyond reach.

A Poetics of Listening

This is an exploration of Kathleen Jamie’s ‘poetics of listening’, a consideration of the importance of ‘listening' within her poetic practice. A 'poetics of listening' is compared with the notion that a poet must first and foremost ‘find their voice’. Close examination of Jamie's poems suggests that the stance of the ‘listener’ is one which allows the poet to encounter the non-human on equal terms, but which also offers a solution to the ethical question ‘why should I write?’. Jamie has been called a ‘supreme listener’, and listening encounters pervade her work. The value she places on ‘attention’ is shown to have a connection with her interest in the oeuvre of Rainer Maria Rilke. It is also argued that in Jamie's work, learning to listen is a way to live with, rather than protest our impermanence.

Midlife Music: The Overhaul and Frissure

This chapter explores the theme of a midlife threshold in Jamie’s two volumes published in 2012-13. Instead of a conversionary trope, such as we find in the famous opening lines of Dante’s Commedia, Jamie’s poetry here explore edges of being that open onto unfixed and transitional states. The forms of the poems are correspondingly fragmentary and fluid. Images of river flow, breezes and bird flight, predominate. If The Tree House depicts Jamie’s local landscape, The Overhaul performs its weather. The poetry here is musical, in the sense explored by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy: it is coming and going, emerging and fading, unlike visual images which appear at once. And like musical performance, which creates echo chambers between instruments struck and sound responding, the subject captured in Jamie’s midlife poetry is attentive and responsive to many voices and noises, not necessarily human ones. Both formally and thematically, these poems perform the processes of fracture and healing, in the body, in landscape, and above all, in the sounds they make falling on the ear.

To KJ, in her Attic

Gifts, elegies and regrets unscroll in mid-life: the view out the window and the light inside. The games, the twice-locked code, the hall of facing mirrors – leave that to the kids. They’ll make a better fist of it. For us remains still life, the bowl of earthly fruit, slightly gone …...

Form in The Tree House

This chapter discusses the use and workings of form in Kathleen Jamie’s The Tree House. It explores how she balances the claims of modernity and tradition, how she deploys an idiom that combines dialect, the demotic and the literary. It argues that the volume’s use of form is in contact with what in one poem is called ‘the common currency’ of human experience. It maintains that the volume’s handling of form shows Jamie’s awareness that any meanings derived from nature have, at least in part, to be meanings conferred upon it. The chapter also discusses Jamie’s ability to interweave motifs and themes on the volume, and it looks at the intermittent, productive tension between grand assertions at the close of poems and the seeming fragility of poetic form as a vehicle for larger resonances. It concludes by affirming that, in the volume, form is a mode of self-aware and resourceful attention.

A Man, a Former Environmental Activist Turned PR Consultant for Logging Companies, Defends His Choices

Voice: The sky is blue. The fairybird is blue. A great bird soars across the sky’s blue dome, its upturned bowl of brightest, brilliant blue above the treeline and the canopy. The canopy is closed: dipterocarpus, your timber-lumber, underneath whose crowns smaller trees grow whose limbs form scaffolding...