The Overhaul: Poems

by Kathleen Jamie

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.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Scotland, 21st Century, British Literature, Animals, Fiction

64 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2012

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

[Annelies · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love poetry which has 'the landscape, environment' as subject. Karhleen Jamie knows as no other how to handle this subject. They tell all that is. The landscape becomes something to dwell in in our mind. It's painting without a pencil.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more that I read of Kathleen Jamie’s work the more I grow to like her writing. I have previously read Findings and Sightlines and thought that they were superb, but I have never read any of her poetry before.

The Overahul is a collection of poems about the thing we sometimes miss in our busy lives.

Some of these were very good indeed. There are a couple in Gaelic or dialect that I could not comprehend, but mostly they were good. My particular favourite was The Lighthouse. What is really impressive though is her mastery of language, she can convey an image with sparkling clarity with a breathtaking brevity, and that is what makes this a delight to read.

[Sophie Breese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jamie is one of my favourite contemporary poets.

[Moira McPartlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathleen Jamie's poem have a quietness about them that hides their punch. Her work looks at nature and what is around us to enjoy. But this collection has an extra tenderness and a sad quality that left me feeling that the hope the jacket blub proclaims is missing. I left this collection feeling very sad for the poet and for the world. It might be a reflection on the dystopian topic of my own current writing and when I read the collection again I will feel differently. I hope so.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me this is between a 4 & a 5, but what the heck. It's lovely. I received it as a first-reads giveaway and am happy to say it's excellent. This short book of poems was a finalist for the 2012 TS Eliot award, kind of the holy grail of poetry awards (Sharon Olds won the award for Stag's Leap), and Jamie is a prominent UK poet. This was the first work of hers I'd read.

For the most part these are accessible lyric poems that even readers who are scared of poetry would enjoy (I'm teaching a poetry appreciation class at our local library right now, so I'm thinking of what scares readers off of poetry). That does not mean they lack sophistication, only that you don't have to be a sophisticated reader to enjoy them.

I have friends in County Fife, and though I've only been there once, it's left a mark on me. I very much enjoyed returning to Scotland via these poems, which focus on landscape, flora, and fauna--including the local residents.

For instance:

Ospreys

You'll be wondering why you bothered: beating
up from Senegal, just to hit a teuchit storm--
late March blizzards and raw winds--before the tilt

across the A9, to arrive, mere
hours apart, at the self-same riverside

Scots pine, and possess again the sticks and fishbones
of last year's nest: still here, pretty much
like the rest of us--gale-battered, winter-worn, half toppled away...

So redd up your cradle, on the tree-top,
claim your teind from the shining
estates of the firth, or the trout-stocked loch.
What do you care? Either way,
there'll be a few glad whispers around town today:
_that's them, baith o' them, they're in._

--From Five Tay Sonnets



Fragment 1

Roe deer,
breaking from a thicket

bounding over briars
between darkening trees

you don't even glance
at the cause of your doubt

so how can you tell
what form I take?

What form I take
I scarcely know myself

adrift in a wood
in a wintertime at dusk

always a deer
breaking from a thicket

for a while now
this is how it's been

[Shelby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathleen Jamie's The Overhaul is a beautiful collection of poems. The imagery and sensory detail is fantastic, really capturing pieces of the natural world and how man interacts with them, whether it's birds, forests, or the sea. The only thing I struggled with were the poems that were attempting to capture an accent. I found them a bit difficult to understand in places. Apart from that I was quite spellbound through the entire book. Definitely worth a read.

I received my copy of The Overhaul for free through Goodreads First Reads.

[Boy Blue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somehow I started with Jamie's writing before I read any of her poems, which feels inappropriate given she was Scotland's Makar from 2021 to 2024.

She's got some cracking poems in this collection. Her highland work reminds me so much of Norman MacCaig she's definitely a spiritual successor of sorts. It's strange how the landscape seems to have pulled such similar responses from both of them. Jamie uses the built environment and human perspective to create the contrast for her otherwise pristine wilderness. Many of the poems are odes to Scotland, its beauty, and its creatures. Jamie's love for her country and what it contains is palpable. Though there's a definite frustration in the poems and at times an existential despair.

Favourites inlcuded

The Dash
Ospreys
Doing Away
Hawk and Shadow
Highland Sketch
The Gather - Sits as a sort of historical artefact preserving a certain way of life off the land.
The Overhaul
Halfling
The Galilean Moons
Tae the Fates
Moon
Glamourie

Let's have a look at Hawk and Shadow

I watched a hawk
glide low across the hill,
her own dark shape
in her talons like a kill.

She tilted her wings,
fell into the air -
the shadow coursed on
without her, like a hare.

Being out of sorts
with my so-called soul,
part unhooked hawk,
part shadow on parole,

I played fast and loose:
keeping one in sight
while forsaking the other
The hawk gained height:

her mate on the ground
began to fade,
till hill and sky were empty,
and I was afraid.

While many of Jamie's poems eschew rhyme. She seems pretty deft at using it.

At the end of the first poem of this collection, The Beach, it seems that Jamie could be spurring herself on to the task ahead.

What a species —
still working the same
curved bay, all of us
hoping for the marvellous,
all hankering for a changed life.

And that self advice returns in the final poem of the collection Materials. Particularly the first verse feels like a call to arms.

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?

Scotland's nature definitely seems to call to its poets to demand them to chronicle its raw beauty. Lucky for Scotland it also seems to have a string of poets ready to answer that call.

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whether reassuringly familiar or seductively foreign, language can transport us. Kathleen Jamie's windblown words taste of salt and sea air; they are rough and beautiful, woven with fishing line and hardy highland brush in shades of green and gold. They feel like the intersection of yearning and knowing. This vocabulary is, quite simply, Scottish. I'm so glad there's no built-in dictionary, no translator's notes or helpful references, because I had to look the unknown words up and find my own meaning on the other side of the globe. I'm so glad because I really heard these poems.

airt: A cardinal point on the compass.
teuchit: The lapwing.
redd: To put in order, to make tidy.
teind: A tenth part of, a tithe.
gean: Wild or seedling sweet cherry.
firth: A narrow inlet of the sea, an estuary.
yowes: Ewes.
lum: A chimney.
bens: High mountains or mountain peaks.
sklent: A sideways or oblique movement.
slub: A lump in yarn or fabric.
bothy: A cottage or hut.
fanks: Pens for enclosing sheep.
tup: An uncastrated male sheep.
trig: Neat, smart-looking.
voe: A small bay or narrow creek.
crofts: Small rented farms.
kittiwake: A medium-sized species of seagull.
gangrel: A wandering beggar; a child just able to walk.
thon: Gender-neutral, third-person singular pronoun coined by Charles Crozat Converse in 1858 (that + one).
disjaiskit: dilapidated, decayed, broken, exhausted.
fetch: The length of water over which a given wind has blown.
jink: To turn quickly, move or dodge.

(Pro tip: It helps to keep the Scots Dictionary handy while reading.)

I discovered Kathleen Jamie on the Poetry Foundation website, which features two poems from this collection. "Moon" mesmerizes with straightforward melancholy and mysterious subtext. "The Stags" will make you ache with longing, with the harried feeling-trumps-thought insistence of the wild hunt. I love both of these poems; they prompted me to seek out Jamie's writing: first her non-fictional essays, and now her poetry.

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?

(from "Materials")

So much about The Overhaul feels just out of reach, tantalizingly so, like the Friedrich Hölderlin poems Jamie has translated from German into Scots and printed alongside her own. When I read them aloud, or hesitantly pronounce the words in my head, they begin to fit together, to make sense: "ah could mak whit's halie / an maist dear tae me — ane perfect poem". It's a bit like reading a screened letter from a soldier with the occasional redacted word, or hearing native speakers after long familiarity only with a textbook. I understand the meaning, somehow, but not all of it. This seems fitting. Jamie populates her poems with people of the sea, people of the earth, people who probably don't lose hours reading about the world's wonders on the internet and instead experience them firsthand, noticed or otherwise. But they're not so different, are they? They, too, "read a while, / leaf through a book / of 19th-century photographs: / hands like stones, / shy, squinting faces / admonish us." (This line, from "Highland Sketch," reminded me of William Williams's and William James Harding's portraits at the Alexander Turnbull Library, like this one, or this.)

Jamie's first-person poems — conversational and chock-full of em-dashes (who doesn't love a good em-dash?) — moved me the most. However far away their narrators, however strange and tangled the language feels on my tongue, these pieces diminish that distance until it barely exists. Here are three of my favorites ("Fragment 1" would have been next in line), but please, please do yourself a favor and read the rest, too. Read The Overhaul in full.

The Spider

When I appear to you
by dark, descended
not from heaven, but the lowest
branch of the walnut tree
bearing no annunciation,
suspended like a slub
in the air's weave
and you shriek, you shriek
so prettily. I'm reminded
of the birds — don't birds also
cultivate elaborate beauty, devour
what catches their eye?
Hence my night shift,
my sulphur-and-black-striped
jacket — poison — a lie
to cloak me while, exposed,
I squeeze from my own gut
the one material.
Who tore the night?
Who caused this rupture?
You, staring in horror
— had you never considered
how the world sustains?
The ants by day
clearing, clearing,
the spiders mending endlessly —

The Whales

If I could stand the pressures,
if I could make myself strong,

I'd dive far under the ocean,
away from these merfolk

— especially the mermen, moaning
and wringing out their beards.

I'd discover a cave
green and ventricular

and there, with tremendous patience,
I'd teach myself to listen:

what the whale-fish hear
answering through the vastnesses

I'd hear too. But oh my love,
tell me you'd swim by,

tell me you'd look out for me,
down there it's impossible to breathe —

Glamourie

When I found I'd lost you —
not beside me, nor ahead,
nor right nor left not
your green jacket moving

between the trees anywhere —
I waited a long while
before wandering on. No wren
jinked in the undergrowth,

not a twig snapped.
It was hardly the Wildwood —
just some auld fairmer's
shelter belt — but red haws

reached out to me,
and between fallen leaves
pretty white flowers bloomed
late into their year. I tried

calling out, or think
I did, but your name
shrivelled on my tongue,
so instead I strolled on

through the wood's good
offices, and duly fell
to wondering if I hadn't
simply made it all up. You,

I mean, everything,
my entire life. Either way,
nothing now could touch me
bar by hosts, who appeared

as diffuse golden light,
as tiny spiders
examining my hair...
What gratitude I felt then —

I might be gone for ages,
maybe seven years! —
and such sudden joie de vivre
that when a ditch gaped

right there instantly in front of me
I jumped it, blithe as a girl —
ach, I jumped clear over it,
without even pausing to think.

[ZZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

You will fell in love with the poems in this collection. As contemporary as they are, they still evoke the feeling of old times.

[Catherine Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Always a pleasure to read about the moon and the sea for 50 pages

[rebeca ravara · Rating 4 out of 5]

how scottish! how wonderful!
favorites included: the dash, the stags, and highland sketch

[Post Defiance]

Originally posted at http://postdefiance.com/seven-swans-a..., written by Timothy Thomas McNeely.

Focused on nature and the nature of the self, The Overhaul is no friendly wander through the woods, to which we are often accustomed in poetry. Instead, in these poems nature is a powerful force for making the world seem strange to us again, for making it new and forcing us to attend to life.

This is the much-anticipated new book of poetry by Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, first since her award-winning collection, The Tree House in 2004. As the opening poem, “The Beach,” puts it: “all of us / hoping for the marvellous, / all hankering for a changed life.”

For another example of the separation that exists in Jamie’s poetry, nature from humankind, take the poem “The Stags,” published in the October issue of Poetry. This is of a gathering of deer, viewed from a distance by the narrator and a friend. It is a distance rarely expressed in American nature poetry, and part of what makes Jamie’s observations so entrancing:

Below us, in the next glen, is the grave
calm brotherhood, descended
out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling
like the signatories of a covenant;
their weighty, antique-polished antlers
rising above the vegetation
like masts in a harbor, or city spires.
We lie close together, and though the wind
whips away our man-and-woman smell, every
stag-face seems to look toward us, toward,
but not to us: we’re held, and hold them,
in civil regard.

Jamie’s book is incisive and compelling and displays some of the very best poetry being written today.

The Overhaul: Poems by Kathleen Jamie. 64 pp. Picador Paperbacks. $11.85.

[ToriJaneReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Genre: Poetry, Nature
Pace: Medium
Format: Kindle
Pages: 60
Rating: 3*s

My first collection of poems by this poet and they did not disappoint.

I really enjoyed these poems and was inspired by her use of Scottish dialect to add an extra layer to her writing. I am a big fan of nature poetry, and this collection hit just the right spot for me. Saying that, I did also find it difficult to comprehend a few that were in a different dialect, and I had to stop to try to search what some phrases/words meant to gain the sense of what Jamie was trying to highlight.

I will definitely keep an eye out for another collections of hers and would recommend this work to anyone who also loves nature poetry and trying something new.

[Sam Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in India this January. A strange book to read in a foreign country, 'Overhaul' is a lyrical poetry collection grounded in the British (specifically Scottish) countryside. The collection shows Jamie making greater use of rhyming forms, connected series, and impressions of immediacy (particularly with nods to previous elemental use of the moon in self-reflexive moments); however, I think that the strong thesis and narrative flow which made 'The Treehouse' so amazing is missing from this collection.

[Davidg · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Kathleen Jamie's books of essays on nature, particularly around Scotland, I found this collection slightly disappointing. Her prose writing is so beautiful and poetic in its descriptions, that I expected more from her poetry. Although there were a number of poems that I loved, I found better poetry in her prose.

I also found the poems written in Scots without any translation, or glossary annoying. I could grasp some of them, but not all. So, no idea what they were about.

I still gave it four stars because three seemed a little mean.

[Rowena Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of tight, sparsely written poems about Scottish nature, often with a surprising turn of phrase. Some of them I really loved, like Halfling, The Gather and Glamourie. Themes such as the moon (which Jamie apparently doesn't like too much), the sea, the woods all feature strongly. Some poems were too cryptic for me to enjoy but I found I liked it best when I let the words wash over me as I read them to create a feeling or a moment.

[Mandy Haggith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is everything you expect from Kathleen Jamie. It won the Costa in 2012 and completely deserved it. The poems are sharp, warm-hearted and full of the most exquisitely perfect details of the natural world. My favourite I think is The Spider - not many people can get away with writing in the voice of a spider, but Kathleen Jamie can.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Overhaul written by Kathleen Jaime is a book of painted poetry. Every poem surrounded me with such imagery, it was like I was there at the stormy beach. I could see the images her words described, in great detail! My favorite poem is Fragment 1! This unique work of art was an amazing read! It's a book I will read over and over again!

[RACHEL · Rating 4 out of 5]

In “Overhaul,” Kathleen Jamie invites readers to take a walk in the hauntingly beautiful landscape of the Scottish highlands. It is well worth the time.

My copy came through Goodreads First Reads.

[Matt Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moon

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, nature-inspired poetry. As with any collection, I loved some more than others. I'd probably rate it 3.5 stars.
Favourites included:
The Gather
The Halfling
The Wood

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better, perhaps, than her books of non-fiction and essays. Her Jamie is expansive and exquisite, rendering full lives of those who interact frequently with the rural world with her flair for dialogue and sympathetic touch, while also considering individual flowers with the same care, the same winsome gravity. For an example of the former, allow me a stanza from the wonderful long poem, "The Gather":

'Ewe-lamb', 'tup-lamp',
each animal was seized,
its tail, severed with one snip,
shrugged through the air
to land in a red plastic pail;
each young tub,
upturned, took two men -
doubled over, heads together,
till the lamb's testicles
likewise thumped softly
into the tub, while we joked:
'Oh, will they no' mak a guid soup?'
No - we will deep-fry them,
like they do in Glaa-sgow
with the Maa-rs bars!
Then thrust, one by one
to the next pen, the lambs
huddled in a corner,
and with blood dribbling
down their sturdy
little thighs, they jumped
very lightly, as though in joy.

Really, it's all there, from the violence of rural relationships and the humour of regional differences to the light touches - "as though" in joy, the gentle surprise of the verbs through which bodies and body-parts collide and move – what more can you ask for?

Very, very recommended.

[Kendalyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading her essay collection Sightlines earlier this year, I developed a craving for more by Jamie and wanted to give her poems a go. As a nature essayist and poet, her writing is deeply invested in the living world so I felt it was only fitting to take this book into the world and read it to the trees, feeding it back to the source. Poetry is an aural art form after all. Giving a voice to her poetry made it that much dearer to me. I'm remiss over the vast amounts of poetry I've read that I've cheated myself of having a similarly profound experience with for the lack of using my tongue. I intended to only read a few poems as I sat near the young afternoon maples but I gave my voice to the whole collection, drawn on and on by the seduction of images and the briefly powerful impressions her poems lent themselves to. I became lost for a moment. Good poetry always has a way of shifting our experience of Time. A way of removing it altogether.

"I haggle for my little/ portion of happiness',/ says each flower, equal, in the scented mass."

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Massive fan of Kathleen Jamie, I’ve loved everything of hers I’ve read so far and you can add this collection to that list. She has this ability to write about the sort of things you might see often, rooks for example, she is able to shine a new light on that thing, seeing it in a way you’ve never considered and it brings it to life on the pages. I especially liked Hawk and Shadow where the poet gets lost trying to focus on the bird and it’s shadow as it glides across the hills.

Favourite was a collection of 5 poems called Five Tay Sonnets a snapshot of 5 brief moments which transport you to the moment. There were a few in Gaelic (I’m guessing the language here) I’ve not much of an idea what they mean but they sound beautiful when read aloud.

A wonderful collection about nature, humanity and hope which will look great on anybody’s shelf.

Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2022...

[Flybyreader · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across Kaithlin Jamie while I was reading another book on women poets writing about nature. I was actually hoping to find The Weird Estate, a little book of anatomical poems with real-life illustrations however I could not find a single copy so I decided to take my chance in her other books. I am not exactly a poem kind of person but these lines resonated with me:

The Moon
—
What do you mean
Entering my study
Like a curiosity shop
Stroking in mild concern

Moon, your work-
worn face bright
Outside unnerves me
Please be on your way



......

Deserts, moonlit oceans, heat
Climbing from a thousand coastal cities
Are as nothing now,
The cave dark we were born in
Calls us back

.....

[Lydia Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poet’s staggeringly simplistic, yet endlessly hypnotising rhetoric. The sort of poetry collection that evokes a reading experience akin to the moment when you submerge your head in the icy waters of a pristine lake, surrounded on all sides by looming crags and the majestic boughs of thousand year old oaks. The lines crackle with the fervour of a raging forest fire, the pages themselves almost harbouring the comforting scent of pine. I urge you to read this book if your mind needs a holiday. You will be transported to an idyllic haven, engulfed in utter solitude, cradled in the bosom of a primordial forest.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Kathleen Jamie.I first discovered her through her prose and her luminously beautiful writing about nature, but I love her poems equally much. Her love of her native Scotland and the landscape bursts from the page and there are so many times when she uses a line that makes me see the world in a new and better way. I particularly enjoy her poems in the Scots dialect, although they are much harder work for me to understand. The Scots words are just glorious.

[Sian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only recently introduced to Kathleen Jamie via a non-fiction bird book. For someone who doesn't dip in to poetry often, this little book completely reignited my interest. I actually adored the Scots poems - 'Hauf o' Life' was my favourite, even though I had to ask my Dad to help translate! 'Ospreys' a close second.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best poems in this collection are domestic. Her attention is so scattered and wilderly that it vivifies an interior and feels a bit uncontained, without emphasis, when the natural landscape is her subject.

Particularly adored the Moon poems and the Scottish poems dedicated to Hölderlin.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection. I am so glad to have discovered Kathleen Jamie, who is fast becoming one of my favourite Scottish poets.