Waterlight: Selected Poems

by Kathleen Jamie

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.

Genres: Poetry, Scotland

140 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2007

About the author

Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and travel writer, one of a remarkable clutch of Scottish writers picked out in 1994 as the ‘new generation poets’ – it was a marketing ploy at the time but turns out to have been a very prescient selection. She became Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling in 2011.

http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....

Reviews

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this collection-- especially drawn to moments like "It's not sea birds or peat she's carrying, / nor fleece, nor the herring bright / but her fear that if she ever put it down / the world would go out like a light." from her poem, The Creel.

[Ann Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time now; finally read it this autumn--and I love Jamie's work. My daughter's living in Scotland now, so perhaps that adds an emotional resonance to the poems for me--but so much in Jamie's gorgeous, lyrical poems appeals. Sound, especially, but also the natural imagery and the swift evocation of city life; the sense of loss and yearning immigrants experience; the full, and fully-conflicting, feelings that accompany motherhood; astonishing shifts in the poems (sometimes).

This selected collection includes just a few poems written in Scots dialect that will make reading the poems challenging for those of us less familiar with Burns and others...but I found reading them aloud (even though I haven't a burr and sound very un-Scots) helped me figure them out. And I love the play of sound in the dialect poems.

Wonderful work. Glad that Greywolf Press brought her to US attention. And next time I visit my daughter, I know I will be heading for a bookstore to buy a few of Jamie's previous 9 poetry collections.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished 1/27/08

I enjoyed this collection. Some of the pieces that were in full Scottish dialect were difficult reads for me and that could affect my rating for this one.... More a problem with the reader than the writer. There were some poems that I loved.

[Shaindel]

Look for an upcoming review of this book in the winter issue of Contrary [http://www.contrarymagazine.com].