Books by Kathleen Jamie
Surfacing
by Margaret Atwood, Kathleen Jamie
“[Kathleen Jamie’s] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over — not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth’s, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest.” —Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, “By the Book” in The New York Times Book Review.
An immersive exploration of time and place in a shrinking world, from the award-winning author of Sightlines.
In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressiely preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.
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Surfacing
by Margaret Atwood, Kathleen Jamie
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—this story of an artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec is a provocative blend of literary mystery, psychological thriller, and spiritual journey.
Accompanied by her boyfriend and a young married couple, the artist searches her abandoned childhood home for clues her parents may have left. But in the disorienting, transformative isolation of the wilderness, her friends’ marriage begins to crumble, sex becomes a catalyst for conflict, and violence and death lurk just beneath the surface. As her relentless probing leads to an electrifying confrontation with her own suppressed secrets, she rapidly descends into what could be either madness or the starkest self-knowledge.
Margaret Atwood’s haunting masterpiece is permeated with suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose.
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The Bonniest Companie
In her extraordinary new 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 visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.
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The Overhaul: Poems
Winner of the 2012 Costa Poetry Award, the latest collection by Kathleen Jamie, "the leading Scottish poet of her generation" (The Sunday Times)
See when it all unravels―the entire project
reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor'wester;
d'you ever imagine chasing just one strand, letting it lead you
to an unsung cleft in a rock, a place you could take to,
dig yourself in―but what are the chances of that?
Of the birds,
few remain all winter; half a dozen waders
mediate between sea and shore, that space confirmed―don't laugh―by your own work.
―from "Materials"
The Overhaul continues Kathleen Jamie's lyric inquiry 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 poetry is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender. The Overhaul is a midlife book of repair, restitution, and ultimately hope―of the wisest and most worldly kind.
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Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland
The first ever collection of contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, Antlers of Water showcases the diversity and radicalism of new Scottish nature writing today.
Edited, curated, and introduced by the award-winning Kathleen Jamie, and featuring prose, poetry, and photography, this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens.
With contributions from Amy Liptrot, Malachy Tallack, Chitra Ramaswamy, Jim Crumley, Amanda Thomson, Karine Polwart, and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical, and political.
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Waterlight: Selected Poems
The first U.S. publication of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, author of The Tree House, winner of the 2004 Forward Prize for best poetry collection
It isn't mine to give.
I can't coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.
―from "The Dipper"
For more than twenty years, Kathleen Jamie has been writing the poetry that has established her as "the leading Scottish poet of her generation" (The Sunday Times). Lyrical and meditative, her poems engage the natural world and human society with an authentic, earthly spirituality.
Waterlight at last makes Jamie's work available to American readers. Her poetry―rendered sometimes in the Scots dialect, sometimes in the descriptive bursts of a naturalist's field guide ―confronts gender, sex, landscape, and nationhood with the vivacity of an essential poetic voice.
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Sightlines
Winner of the 2014 Orion Book Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the John Burroughs Association 2014 Medal for Distinguished Natural History Book
In Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie reports from the field―from her native Scottish “byways and hills” to the frigid Arctic in fourteen enthralling essays. She dissects whatever her gaze falls upon―vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, orcas rounding a headland, the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea. In so doing, she questions what, exactly, constitutes “nature,” and upends the idea that it is always picturesque. Written with precision, subtlety, and wry humor, Sightlines urges the reader: “Keep looking, even when there’s nothing much to see.” 22 B&W photographs
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