Review by Peter Reason
I am sitting under the old apple tree in our Orchard on a sunny summer afternoon, looking over the meadow grass swaying in the light breeze, delighted when a little flock of long-tailed tits arrive and flutter around in the branches. Life at this moment is as it should be. Except of course, for the looming anxiety about climate change and ecological catastrophe: will there be enough insects around to pollinate my runner beans, I wonder?
I open Kathleen Jamie’s new book. I had rushed down to Mr B’s bookshop earlier in the day: “Do you have Kathleen Jamie’s new book?” “Of course we do!” says the bookseller. He is also a fan, and we spend a few moments exchanging recollections of her earlier writing. Sitting under the apple tree, this is my first opportunity to read.
The prologue tells of her night walk in the Northern Isles as a storm is blowing. She goes through the sheltered streets, then out onto the exposed coast overlooking Scapa Flow. As the wind threatens to blow her over, she watches the surging waves, the scudding clouds, the occasional star. Then the lighthouses, built by Stevenson in the nineteenth century, attract her attention. She notices the pattern of lights – one occulting and one isophase – how they cast a path over the sea; and reflects on the security the lights brought to shipping. I have sailed these waters myself. I know what it means to follow leading lights through rocky passages in deep darkness, just as she describes. I’m immediately drawn in, captivated by the quality of her writing: as John Berger wrote about her work, “she renders the indefinable to the reader’s ear.”
She writes of life is as it should be, even – maybe especially – in this stormy weather. And yet, like me under my apple tree, she cannot avoid that same looming anxiety. While now she is 60, she thinks, “I can imagine the world going on without me”, but
… the cycles against which that mortality has played out, the great consolations, are becoming disrupted. It’s no longer sure that the seabirds will return to the cliffs here, from their wintering places out on the ocean; their numbers fall… the securities my generation knew no longer hold.
So I sit here in the comfort of my orchard watching the tits, listening to the metallic cry of jackdaws, and I enter the alchemy of Kathleen Jamie’s gorgeous writing as she so elegantly confronts us with these profoundly impossible truths:
These ‘unprecedented’ events: we can follow them 24/7 on our phones, or we don’t, we scroll on. ‘Anyway,’ we say, ‘… let’s talk of something else.’
And so we do turn to something else, for while climate change looms constantly in the background of Jamie’s writing, thankfully it is not always foregrounded. Turning the page, I travel with her as she follows a woman with a buggy through an urban wasteland. With just a hint of who we are following – ‘her black garments billow in the onshore breeze’ – we understand why she wants to call out that she is not a threat, even catch up and ‘Maybe you’d exchange a few words.’ But the opportunity is missed. All this on a single page of prose, enough detail to draw you into the place and its social implications, not a word too many, not a word out of place. Then on another page a poem remembering clearing her parents’ house with her siblings: laughing at what they find, then ‘Suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore. Suddenly we were greeten’ for everything we’d known as bairns’. A few pages later they scatter the ashes in a loch that, though lovely, is actually constructed as a reservoir: ‘Something’s becoming clear – OK, fuck it. This would do’.
A cairn, so the back-cover blurb reminds us, is ‘a marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers’. The book is a collection of short forms – personal notes, prose poems, micro-essays, fragments – noticing the natural world. As soon as I had started reading, I immediately wanted to write about the book myself – a foolish challenge maybe, for who am I to place my writing next to Jamie’s? But I can’t help myself, for on each page I find a phrase I want to quote – ‘there’s more days past than ahead of you/ – now you can begin’;
And so I resist the urge, that sense of duty and obligation, to read the whole book before I write my review. I will ride with my enthusiasm and refuse to rush this reading. I take as given that the rest of the writing will be as enchanting as the first third I have read, so I will approach the remainder at my leisure. But, dear reader, you should rush out and buy this book! It lives up to its name: a series of markers from which to view this frail human life as it ages, always grounded in the more-than-human, always in the face of a changing, insecure world, offered in the most beautiful language I can imagine.
Peter’s reviews of Kathleen Jamie’s earlier prose collections are here and here.
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He has just launched Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Kathleen Jamie, Cairn (Sort of Books, 2024). 978-1914502002,160 pp., flapped paperback.
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