Kathleen Jamie’s latest collection, Cairn, is slender – a mix of short prose fragments and a handful of poems – but do not make the mistake of supposing it slight. This marvel of a book is a profound meditation on the precariousness of the planet, braided to a personal sense of impermanence, not least in those pieces written as she edged towards her 60th birthday: “I can imagine the world going on without me, which one doesn’t at 30. Or shouldn’t.” This is a book where you keep encountering perfectly judged images such as this one: “Suddenly a crowd of white butterflies was fluttering around me like a shredded contract” that make one sigh with pleasure. She is an unshowily inspired writer.
The book is titled Cairn because it is made up of discrete pieces piled up together to form a whole – a landmark. The tone is an unforced mixture of conscience, wryness and heart that comes across as unmistakably and triumphantly Scottish. This is underpinned by Jamie’s lifelong love of the Scottish landscape. Her opening piece, Northern Isles, is about how her way of seeing has changed and traces the slippage from innocence to experience (she takes an unreasonably dim view of the poetry of her youth, chastising herself for being a romantic). The book is part diary, part appreciation and, by implication, part SOS. She is vividly undeceived about where we are now, recognising, in The Bass Rock, that nature is no longer uncomplicatedly a poet’s best friend: “It’s a while since we could turn to the natural world for reassurance, since we could map our individual lives against the eternal cycle of the seasons, our griefs against the consolation of birds, the hills.”
