Join thousands of book lovers
Sign up to our newsletter and receive discounts and inspiration for your next reading experience.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.You can, at any time, unsubscribe from our newsletters.
"e;A sorceress of the essay form."e; John Berger Five years after Findings broke the mould of nature writing, Kathleen Jamie subtly shifts our focus on landscape and the living world, daring us to look again at the 'natural', the remote and the human-made. She offers us the closest of perspectives and the most distant, too: from vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, or the pores of a whale's jawbone under restoration, to satellites rising over a Scottish island, or the aurora borealis lighting up an iceberg-strewn sea. We encounter killer whales circling below cliffs, noisy colonies of breeding gannets, and paintings deep in caves. Written with precision, delicacy and personal recollection, Sightlines invites us to pause and look afresh at our surroundings.
For several years now, Kathleen Jamie's work has addressed two principal concerns: how we negotiate with the natural world, and how we should define our conduct within family and society. In The Tree House Jamie argues - as Burns did before her - for an engagement of the whole being through a kind of practical earthly spirituality. These often startling encounters with animals, birds, and other humans propose a way of living which recognises the earth as home to many different consciousnesses -- and a means of authentic engagement with 'this, the only world'. Together they form one of the most powerful poetic statements of recent years.
A timely career retrospective including material from Kathleen Jamie's earlier collections and featuring writing on her recurrent themes of nature, language, and human and animal consciousness.
In her extraordinary collection, Kathleen Jamie examines her native Scotland - a country at once wild and contained, rural and urban - and her place within it. In the author's own words: '2014 was a year of tremendous energy in my native Scotland, and knowing I wanted to embrace that energy and participate in my own way, I resolved to write a poem a week, and follow the cycle of the year.' The poems also venture into childhood and family memory - and look to ahead to the future. The Bonniest Companie is a visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.
The Overhaul is Kathleen Jamie's first collection since the award-winning The Tree House, and it broadens her poetic range considerably. The Overhaul continues Jamie's lyric enquiry into the aspects of the world our rushing lives elide, and even threaten. Whether she is addressing birds or rivers, or the need to accept loss, or sometimes, the desire to escape our own lives, her work is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender. As an essayist, she has frequently queried our human presence in the world with the question 'How are we to live?' Here, this is answered more personally than ever. The Overhaul is a mid-life book of repair, restitution, and ultimately hope - of the wisest and most worldly kind.
Jamie's poetry is intelligent and subtle, her language inventive and refreshing. This is a wide-ranging selection. It reveals the generous range of her concerns, from life in the wilder parts of Pakistan and Tibet, to the difficult questions of identity posed in the celebrated Queen of Sheba.
Sign up to our newsletter and receive discounts and inspiration for your next reading experience.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.