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Cairn
Cairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers.
For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape.
The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.
Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.
For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape.
The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.
Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.
136 pages, Paperback
Published June 13, 2024
41 people are currently reading
474 people want to read
About the author
Kathleen Jamie
71 books324 followersKathleen 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....
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
June 29, 2024
As she approached age 60, Kathleen Jamie found her style changing. Whereas her other essay collections alternate extended nature or travel pieces with few-page vignettes, Cairn eschews longer material and instead alternates poems with micro-essays on climate crisis and outdoor experiences. In the prologue she calls these “distillations and observations. Testimonies” that she has assembled into “A cairn of sorts.”
As in Surfacing, she writes many of the autobiographical fragments in the second person. The book is melancholy at times, haunted by all that has been lost and will be lost in the future:
In “The Bass Rock,” Jamie laments the effect that bird flu has had on this famous gannet colony and wishes desperately for better news:
Natural wonders remind her of her own mortality and the insignificance of human life against deep time. “I can imagine the world going on without me, which one doesn’t at 30.” She questions the value of poetry in a time of emergency: “If we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive. How to write a lyric poem?” (from “Summer”). The same could be said of any human endeavour in the face of extinction: We question the point but still we continue.
My two favourite pieces were “The Handover,” about going on an environmental march with her son and his friends in Glasgow and comparing it with the protests of her time (Greenham Common and nuclear disarmament) – doom and gloom was ever thus – and the title poem, which piles natural image on image like a cone of stones. Although I prefer the depth of Jamie’s other books to the breadth of this one, she is an invaluable nature writer for her wisdom and eloquence, and I am grateful we have heard from her again after five years.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
As in Surfacing, she writes many of the autobiographical fragments in the second person. The book is melancholy at times, haunted by all that has been lost and will be lost in the future:
What do we sense on the moor but ghost folk,
ghost deer, even ghost wolf. The path itself is a
phantom, almost erased in ling and yellow tormentil (from “Moor”)
In “The Bass Rock,” Jamie laments the effect that bird flu has had on this famous gannet colony and wishes desperately for better news:
The light glances on the water. The haze clears, and now the rock is visible; it looks depleted. But hallelujah, a pennant of twenty-odd gannets is passing, flying strongly, now rising now falling They’ll be Bass Rock birds. What use the summer sunlight, if it can’t gleam on a gannet’s back? You can only hope next year will be different. Stay alive! You call after the flying birds. Stay alive!
Natural wonders remind her of her own mortality and the insignificance of human life against deep time. “I can imagine the world going on without me, which one doesn’t at 30.” She questions the value of poetry in a time of emergency: “If we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive. How to write a lyric poem?” (from “Summer”). The same could be said of any human endeavour in the face of extinction: We question the point but still we continue.
My two favourite pieces were “The Handover,” about going on an environmental march with her son and his friends in Glasgow and comparing it with the protests of her time (Greenham Common and nuclear disarmament) – doom and gloom was ever thus – and the title poem, which piles natural image on image like a cone of stones. Although I prefer the depth of Jamie’s other books to the breadth of this one, she is an invaluable nature writer for her wisdom and eloquence, and I am grateful we have heard from her again after five years.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
October 8, 2024
Cairn or Carn in Gaelic means just a pile of stones. They are just a marker of some event or place and can be found all over the world. Some of them can be really old reaching far back into pre-history. In this collection of prose. poems and essays, Jamie has drawn together pieces that are her marker of 60 years on this planet.
The collection begins with her remembering walking southwards towards the lighthouses. A storm has blown up and she is leaning into the wind. As soon as she passes the shelter of the houses, she gets to feel the full force of the wind and is almost blown over. She pauses in the lee of the wind and watches the waves, hears the wind and sees the pulse of the light flashing in the night.
She was soon to find love after this, make a home, and bring up children. Writing opportunities came her way and suddenly she is thirty years older. This book is looking back at what happened over those three decades and this is a marker of that time. But there are no rough rocks in here, rather there precious stones and gems.
Whatever we begin (begin again)
We begin lonely
To say I loved this book would be an understatement. Jamie has always been one of my favourite authors. Her pin-sharp observations of the things that I would never think to glance at, and the way that she moulds her words into the prose and poems that lie within, is just breathtaking. If there was a tiny flaw with the book I thought that it was too short, but I say this out of greed on my part. This isn’t a cairn, this is a literary example of the stone balancer’s art. Please read it as soon as you are able to get your hands on a copy.
The collection begins with her remembering walking southwards towards the lighthouses. A storm has blown up and she is leaning into the wind. As soon as she passes the shelter of the houses, she gets to feel the full force of the wind and is almost blown over. She pauses in the lee of the wind and watches the waves, hears the wind and sees the pulse of the light flashing in the night.
She was soon to find love after this, make a home, and bring up children. Writing opportunities came her way and suddenly she is thirty years older. This book is looking back at what happened over those three decades and this is a marker of that time. But there are no rough rocks in here, rather there precious stones and gems.
Whatever we begin (begin again)
We begin lonely
To say I loved this book would be an understatement. Jamie has always been one of my favourite authors. Her pin-sharp observations of the things that I would never think to glance at, and the way that she moulds her words into the prose and poems that lie within, is just breathtaking. If there was a tiny flaw with the book I thought that it was too short, but I say this out of greed on my part. This isn’t a cairn, this is a literary example of the stone balancer’s art. Please read it as soon as you are able to get your hands on a copy.
July 12, 2024
Great, great writing. She just gets better. Spare and essential Jamie finds the heart and soul of the natural world and the damage which we have done.
January 8, 2025
I can’t find my words today. There are some lovely reviews here. Check them out.
November 21, 2024
Thia is a favorite of the year. Kathleen Jamie writes beautifully. She brings nature and places so alive. Sometimes she brings us back years so we have contrast and sometimes she tells us what the future might be. Here she writes about places, north and northeast of Scotland. Some of it has already been changed because of oil rigs and natures changes. She created beautiful pictures in my head and at times sadness - like what’s happening to the huge whales that have no place really to go to because the glaciers are melting. I wish I had traveled there when I was younger to see these amazing mammals and the beauty of the glaciers.
In this book, she is writing in a different style; short articles, short stories, Some memories and yet she ties them all together because this is the world up there and it holds so much wonder and beauty and life still.
This is one of my favorite books of the year. I’m so grateful for her respect of nature and her honest eyes. I can no longer travel. I’m grateful for her bringing this world alive and to to be able tospend time there.
November 21, 2024
Thia is a favorite of the year. Kathleen Jamie writes beautifully. She brings nature and places so alive. Sometimes she brings us back years so we have contrast and sometimes she tells us what the future might be. Here she writes about places, north and northeast of Scotland. Some of it has already been changed because of oil rigs and natures changes. She created beautiful pictures in my head and at times sadness - like what’s happening to the huge whales that have no place really to go to because the glaciers are melting. I wish I had traveled there when I was younger to see these amazing mammals and the beauty of the glaciers.
In this book, she is writing in a different style; short articles, short stories, Some memories and yet she ties them all together because this is the world up there and it holds so much wonder and beauty and life still.
This is one of my favorite books of the year. I’m so grateful for her respect of nature and her honest eyes. I can no longer travel. I’m grateful for her bringing this world alive and to to be able tospend time there.
September 12, 2024
A series of short, some very short, non-fiction pieces on the Scottish environment. I find it difficult to overstate how much I enjoyed this book. What seems like simple prose, is a powerful, elegant, flowing series of short pieces, almost musings and observations on nature. Highly poetic, which is not surprising as Jamie is also Makar - Scotland's national poet.
Although obviously a much later book, it reminded of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain a little - not just because they are both Scottish women writing about nature, but more because of the way they write about it. They are not just observers of nature, though fine observers they are as any good writer must be, but they are situated within nature. They are partaking of it, not merely commenting on it. The big difference is that Jamie's book is much more melancholy reflecting the state of, and decline of, nature in her surrounds.
I could have read this book in one sitting, but I stretched it out for 4 days to savour it more. I shall look out for more of her work. I did not know her writing before this book, but if this is anything to go by, I shall look for more.
Although obviously a much later book, it reminded of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain a little - not just because they are both Scottish women writing about nature, but more because of the way they write about it. They are not just observers of nature, though fine observers they are as any good writer must be, but they are situated within nature. They are partaking of it, not merely commenting on it. The big difference is that Jamie's book is much more melancholy reflecting the state of, and decline of, nature in her surrounds.
I could have read this book in one sitting, but I stretched it out for 4 days to savour it more. I shall look out for more of her work. I did not know her writing before this book, but if this is anything to go by, I shall look for more.
June 20, 2024
Excellent collection
This collection of short non-fiction pieces and poetry is, as one would expect from Kathleen Jamie, beautifully written, with turns of phrase that make you pause, re-read, reconsider and sometimes cause a subtle shift in your appreciation of its subject. Her usual themes are here - nature, the environment, Scotland. It is a collection to dip into, not to gulp down in one sitting, it is a collection to ponder with, to spend time with, and to enjoy. Beautiful stuff.
This collection of short non-fiction pieces and poetry is, as one would expect from Kathleen Jamie, beautifully written, with turns of phrase that make you pause, re-read, reconsider and sometimes cause a subtle shift in your appreciation of its subject. Her usual themes are here - nature, the environment, Scotland. It is a collection to dip into, not to gulp down in one sitting, it is a collection to ponder with, to spend time with, and to enjoy. Beautiful stuff.
December 6, 2024
When identifying the nature of this book, it's best to turn to Jamie herself.
And sure enough in some of these pieces is the sort of observation and turn of phrase that has made her Scotland's Makar.
She finds the stories and most importantly the point on which they pivot from the mundane to the extraordinary.
As always Jamie's eyes see nature differently, and she can turn those visions into such perfect obeservations.
It makes sense then that someone who lives at one of the globe's extremities, and has made her life's work observing her surrounds and the changes in them would feel climate change so strongly. In many ways it's the dominant thread through all of these bits and pieces. While the autumn of Jamie's own years has begun and that colours a lot of this, it's the perceived autumn of the earth's years that causes the most distress.
A lot of it comes across as quite alarmist but then Jamie has her finger on the earth's pulse in a way few other people do. I couldn't help but feel an extended metaphor in Jamie's talk of a granite stone carried and deposited by a melted glacier.
Could she be talking of herself or her generation leaving us with their climate legacy. Or is their no metaphor, and just a giant slab of granite. Whatever the meaning the delivery is characteristically stunning.
Nearing sixty, I found myself back at a beginning - always a lonely time but at least now familiar. I was writing again but in a different way, making short pieces, micro-essays, pages, call them what you will. Like the local stone here, they fractured easily. I wrote about incidents, memories, moments that caught my attention. They were distillations and observations. Testimonies. Over a few years they accumulated, and eventually I found myself assembling them into this book. A cairn of sorts.
And sure enough in some of these pieces is the sort of observation and turn of phrase that has made her Scotland's Makar.
Passing through browned grass, I reached the uncelebrated source, a dampness guarded by nettles which I accidentally brushed, and suddenly a crowd of white butterflies was fluttering around me like a shredded contract, so many for one moment I felt a leap of joy, like a five years bairn again, blythly venturing toward the edge of the known, but with no-one left alive to call me home.
She finds the stories and most importantly the point on which they pivot from the mundane to the extraordinary.
Our neighbour Julie Goring is an artist who's been watching and feeding these local jackdaws for years; she can tell the High Street Hoodlums from the Hill Street Gang form the East-Enders. From her own dormer window she can reach down to a gutter where she leaves peanuts and in exhange the jackdaws sometimes bring her silvery gifts, leaving them in the same place. Recently she's received a 5p piece, a single amber earring and, amazingly, a small coin from Hong Kong. Hong Kong! Where'd they find that, hereabouts? Maybe jackdaws have their own trade routes.
As always Jamie's eyes see nature differently, and she can turn those visions into such perfect obeservations.
And there's the loch: naturalised, reed-fringed, a heron flying so low its wingtips almost graze their own reflections.
It makes sense then that someone who lives at one of the globe's extremities, and has made her life's work observing her surrounds and the changes in them would feel climate change so strongly. In many ways it's the dominant thread through all of these bits and pieces. While the autumn of Jamie's own years has begun and that colours a lot of this, it's the perceived autumn of the earth's years that causes the most distress.
But the cycles against which mortality is played out, the great consolations, are becoming disrupted. It's no longer sure that the seabirds will return to the cliffs here, from their wintering places out on the ocean; their numbers fall. It's said that the geese, even now arriving from the north, are ceasing to make such migrations because the world is warming. Of course, there has always been sea level change. The Ice Age ended; these islands would not be islands otherwise. Under the waves are remains of forests, even dwellings. 'Eustatic' is the word, meaning 'relating to sea level change'. The first time I encountered the word, I misread it as 'ecstatic'. The ecstasy of change, everywhere, but frightening, and fast.
The securities my generation knew no longer hold. No-one can say, 'Line up your lights, follow that path and you will steer to safety.' My son spoke about the fear of climate breakdown 'ticking away' during his life. That was only a couple of years ago and already it's no longer ticking. It's here and happening. Natural disasters and wars are everywhere at hand. Storms and winds are no longer just weather. These 'unprecedented' events: we can now follow them 24/7 on our phones, or we don't, we scroll on. 'Anyway', we say, 'let's talk of something else.' Nevertheless, the lights still beam out across the dark waves. What do they code for now?
A lot of it comes across as quite alarmist but then Jamie has her finger on the earth's pulse in a way few other people do. I couldn't help but feel an extended metaphor in Jamie's talk of a granite stone carried and deposited by a melted glacier.
It must have weathered a long time alone up at the bealach, borne like a palanquin then stranded as the glaciers thinned. Here is where we must leave you, we are vanishing, your weight is more than we can stand.
Could she be talking of herself or her generation leaving us with their climate legacy. Or is their no metaphor, and just a giant slab of granite. Whatever the meaning the delivery is characteristically stunning.
July 12, 2024
A collection of writings, fragments, observations, memories, by the nature writi g Scottish poet. A collective witnessing of changes in the local environment, and of migratory patterms disrupted, of things once common now departed.
As she arrives at her 60th year, she begins to ask different questions, about the next generation and the one after that, if there will indeed be one as children question whether to bring another generation into this vastly changing world.
As she arrives at her 60th year, she begins to ask different questions, about the next generation and the one after that, if there will indeed be one as children question whether to bring another generation into this vastly changing world.
July 20, 2024
Quite simply Kathleen Jamie is one of the greatest living writers today! I have loved her previous nature writing but this is an intense shot, the pure essence of her fabulous words.
December 28, 2024
4.5
Beautiful and thought-provoking mini essays by Kathleen Jamie as she turns 60. Not a particularly joyful read as Jamie dwells heavily on the sadness of climate change, and the unknowns that her children and their future children will face. But it's not miserable either and not too heavy. Poetic descriptions of the natural world, of grief and love, of our mortality. I meant to read Jamie years ago, and I'm really glad I've finally done so.
Beautiful and thought-provoking mini essays by Kathleen Jamie as she turns 60. Not a particularly joyful read as Jamie dwells heavily on the sadness of climate change, and the unknowns that her children and their future children will face. But it's not miserable either and not too heavy. Poetic descriptions of the natural world, of grief and love, of our mortality. I meant to read Jamie years ago, and I'm really glad I've finally done so.
June 15, 2025
A series of insights, thoughts and reflections which were heart-warming, beautiful and stirred up lots of feelings as well as an urge to do more to help the planet. I found her position as a Mum very moving, and helped me process some of my own loss and grief.
June 27, 2024
Absolutely beautiful, as ever. What a delight to be reading Kathleen Jamie again. Her return with her new book, Cairn, is masterful – in this new collection of short pieces and poems, she exceeds herself, the format enabling her to chisel each piece to perfection until what is left of a rough stone (though beautiful to begin with) is its shimmering centre. She brings all of her grace and poetic mastery to this collection, one that deserves reading and rereading often. Full review: https://bookerthanyou.blogspot.com/20...
August 16, 2024
Pause. Notice the change, feel the fear. This is beautiful writing.
For the frightening moments, a reminder that we are still here and still care.
For the frightening moments, a reminder that we are still here and still care.
September 21, 2024
Der Begriff Cairn hat verschiedene Bedeutungen. Der Cairn, der dem Buch den Titel gibt, bezeichnet Wegmarkierungen in den Bergen: Kleine Häufchen aus Steinen, die entlang einer Route aufgeschüttet werden, damit die Wanderer den Weg nicht verlieren.
Ähnlich ist es mit den kleineren und größeren Texten in Kathleen Jamies Buch. Ich habe mir beim Lesen immer vorgestellt, dass Kathleen Jamie ihr eigenes Cairn hatte: ein Häufchen aus Notizen, aus denen sie die auswählte, die sie in ihrem Buch zusammengestellt hat. Auf den ersten Blick ist es eine zufällige Mischung, aber sie ergeben doch ein Ganzes: kleine Gedichte, Gedanken über die Zukunft und die Vergangenheit, Erinnerungen an ihre Eltern und die Wünsche, die sie für ihre Kinder hat.
Sie zeigen den neuen Weg, den sie nach ihrem 60. Geburtstag einschlagen wollte: weg von dem, was sie bisher geschrieben hat und hin zu einer neuen Form. Sie hat die Worte und die niederländische Künstlerin Miek Zwamborn die Bilder dazu: zarte Skizzen in Schwarzweiß, die perfekt zu dem passen, was Kathleen Jamie geschrieben hat. Kein Buch, um hintereinander weg zu lesen. Eher eines, das man immer wieder zur Hand nimmt, um darin zu stöbern und immer wieder etwas zu finden, das berührt.
Ähnlich ist es mit den kleineren und größeren Texten in Kathleen Jamies Buch. Ich habe mir beim Lesen immer vorgestellt, dass Kathleen Jamie ihr eigenes Cairn hatte: ein Häufchen aus Notizen, aus denen sie die auswählte, die sie in ihrem Buch zusammengestellt hat. Auf den ersten Blick ist es eine zufällige Mischung, aber sie ergeben doch ein Ganzes: kleine Gedichte, Gedanken über die Zukunft und die Vergangenheit, Erinnerungen an ihre Eltern und die Wünsche, die sie für ihre Kinder hat.
Sie zeigen den neuen Weg, den sie nach ihrem 60. Geburtstag einschlagen wollte: weg von dem, was sie bisher geschrieben hat und hin zu einer neuen Form. Sie hat die Worte und die niederländische Künstlerin Miek Zwamborn die Bilder dazu: zarte Skizzen in Schwarzweiß, die perfekt zu dem passen, was Kathleen Jamie geschrieben hat. Kein Buch, um hintereinander weg zu lesen. Eher eines, das man immer wieder zur Hand nimmt, um darin zu stöbern und immer wieder etwas zu finden, das berührt.
June 23, 2025
Kathleen Jamie is one of my favourite Scottish poets and non-fiction writers. Her trilogy (Sightlines, Findings, and Surfacing) guides readers through landscapes, emotions, and life events with remarkable subtlety and insight. Her latest collection, Cairn, brings together brief essays, poems, and what Jamie herself describes as fragments of work. Here, she revisits the terrain familiar from her earlier books, now with an even greater sense of poignancy and loss.
The writing in Cairn is as strong as ever, but I found myself missing the narrative arc that carried me through her previous works. Instead, the collection offers a quieter, more reflective awareness of time’s passage (something that felt especially resonant as Jamie and I are of a similar age).
Though we live thousands of kilometres apart and have led different lives, I found myself relating to the challenges and reflections she shares.
Ultimately, Cairn is a good read, but for me, the fragments didn’t quite add up to the same powerful effect as her earlier, more cohesive books.
The writing in Cairn is as strong as ever, but I found myself missing the narrative arc that carried me through her previous works. Instead, the collection offers a quieter, more reflective awareness of time’s passage (something that felt especially resonant as Jamie and I are of a similar age).
Though we live thousands of kilometres apart and have led different lives, I found myself relating to the challenges and reflections she shares.
Ultimately, Cairn is a good read, but for me, the fragments didn’t quite add up to the same powerful effect as her earlier, more cohesive books.
August 28, 2025
I really like Jamie, as (I think) everybody living in Scotland is contractually obliged to, but I felt this one fell a bit flat. She is clearly trying to reconcile her singular type of quasi–nature writing with her growing concern about climate change and its impact on nature; but I don’t think she manages the synthesis, and her politics come across as inexpert and sometimes unthinking, sticking out like a sore thumb against the background of her obvious intellectual abilities.
March 30, 2025
You've gotta read something a little pretentious every now and then
January 4, 2025
I think I've just finished a re-read. I found a train ticket stuck half way through the book, and as I read forwards it soon became clear that I'd read some (many? all?) of the remainder of the pieces.
She puts into words my inchoate thoughts about the climate crisis and then some.
She puts into words my inchoate thoughts about the climate crisis and then some.
December 15, 2024
Having read Surfacing I thought I would enjoy this too but I really couldn’t get into it and didn’t actually finish the book although it’s such a small one. I appreciate the accumulation of short stories is how the author prefers to write nowadays and these short pieces have come together as a cairn does, to mark the route or symbolise the stoping point. I did enjoy the more scientific writings highlighting the authors research but I found the autobiographical pieces to be too self indulgent and melancholic and actually a little boring.
September 11, 2024
The common curlew, as the old books have it,
Fragments, essays, poems & notes, following the natural world, and the mess we have made of it. Beautiful.
July 12, 2024
Peaceful, needs reading again in fragments
September 9, 2024
Stunning, beautiful & my book of the year so far, absolutely loved it from beginning to end, I’ll be delving into her back catalogue & look forward to reading this gem again & again.
March 24, 2025
There was a time, walking to the summit of Cairn Gorm, when we were losing vision. We struggled to follow the tracks through the snow. Just then: we could make out a darker mass: a cairn guiding our way, making itself known through the snow.
This book is as such: if not my eyes squinting through the white-out, adjusting to the landscape anew; I was repeatedly surprised by Jamie's acute and profound observations.
There were two pieces that - as a woman in my twenties - unbeknownst to what will become of me and the shape of my life: Jordan Street and The Handover. In Jordan Street, Jamie recalls a dream of her student flat: the tangle of bikes, bookshelves made of bricks and the squabbles when the bill arrives. Experiences still nearby in my memory; close enough, it feels, to touch.
In The Handover we are again in a student flat and time has collapsed: there's the older women there at Greenham Common, and there's Jamie: on the flyover, on the march through Glasgow. She's with her son and his friends - my generation.
A book whose wisdom I will undoubtedly return to again, and again.
This book is as such: if not my eyes squinting through the white-out, adjusting to the landscape anew; I was repeatedly surprised by Jamie's acute and profound observations.
There were two pieces that - as a woman in my twenties - unbeknownst to what will become of me and the shape of my life: Jordan Street and The Handover. In Jordan Street, Jamie recalls a dream of her student flat: the tangle of bikes, bookshelves made of bricks and the squabbles when the bill arrives. Experiences still nearby in my memory; close enough, it feels, to touch.
In the dream, we got it together as we never had on Jordan Street - unfinished business! He was a male presence, the smell of his thick shirt and muddle of unwashed sheets.
I wouldn't know him if I passed him on the street. He'd be a pensioner, and no revolution yet.
In The Handover we are again in a student flat and time has collapsed: there's the older women there at Greenham Common, and there's Jamie: on the flyover, on the march through Glasgow. She's with her son and his friends - my generation.
So there's another quick leap, from women having no control over their fertility, to deciding against having children at all because they fear the world they'll be raising them in.
A book whose wisdom I will undoubtedly return to again, and again.
Read
June 4, 2025Started this book after seeing Kathleen Jamie's readings with the Irish Writers Center where Alice Kinsella was interviewing her. She is quite insightful about her practice, including about nature writing. The collection clearly suggests someone who has been doing this for decades. I liked how she held the actual Whaup's Skull she was writing about - it is one of my favorite pieces from the collection, along with Plasthvalen, Lost Geese, and Erratic.
The book's title is so good, as the sense of a Cairn finds itself throughout the collection. Even fragments of sentences like this one give the sense a Cairn does: "Neolithic tomb-builders were masters of this kind of thing...", switching between how precise the cairn looks against a vague sort of landscape, often just a field. Some of her turns of phrase are interesting too, like:
"Ach, now I’m missing Calum, he of the wry smile, who died so suddenly this time last year."
"They are our small-town upperworld of lost souls, we their netherworld of shades, scuttling home with a last-minute litre of milk or packet of Rizlas."
"In the stubble field I found a piece of old glass, creamy with streaks of grey-blue, like a fragment of sky that had been shot down."
Generally, I found myself favoring the micro essays or prose pieces, just personal taste. The images inclusions are charming, and I like that she includes Scottish English words quite naturally, like bairn and bealach.
The book's title is so good, as the sense of a Cairn finds itself throughout the collection. Even fragments of sentences like this one give the sense a Cairn does: "Neolithic tomb-builders were masters of this kind of thing...", switching between how precise the cairn looks against a vague sort of landscape, often just a field. Some of her turns of phrase are interesting too, like:
"Ach, now I’m missing Calum, he of the wry smile, who died so suddenly this time last year."
"They are our small-town upperworld of lost souls, we their netherworld of shades, scuttling home with a last-minute litre of milk or packet of Rizlas."
"In the stubble field I found a piece of old glass, creamy with streaks of grey-blue, like a fragment of sky that had been shot down."
Generally, I found myself favoring the micro essays or prose pieces, just personal taste. The images inclusions are charming, and I like that she includes Scottish English words quite naturally, like bairn and bealach.
October 31, 2024
Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie occasionally turns her hand to prose... as she wrote herself:
'Around the age of 40, I decided to teach myself how to write prose. With no talent for fiction, I tried the non-fiction essay form.'
I love her three books: Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing. All are books of essays, some short, some long. All memoir of the life of a woman with a curious mind that turns to archaeology, to natural history, to anthropology, to politics and to family. She writes so beautifully and relateably and now as she reaches the age of 60 she was written a new collection, Cairn.
This time the essays are shorter and gathered together with poetry in a collection that is maybe her most reflective yet. She is worried about the world we live in, worried for her children's future but still excited to see a whale breach in the Forth, or the swifts return after a winter away.
Read it slowly, then read it again. Then go back and read her other books. That's my advice.
'Around the age of 40, I decided to teach myself how to write prose. With no talent for fiction, I tried the non-fiction essay form.'
I love her three books: Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing. All are books of essays, some short, some long. All memoir of the life of a woman with a curious mind that turns to archaeology, to natural history, to anthropology, to politics and to family. She writes so beautifully and relateably and now as she reaches the age of 60 she was written a new collection, Cairn.
This time the essays are shorter and gathered together with poetry in a collection that is maybe her most reflective yet. She is worried about the world we live in, worried for her children's future but still excited to see a whale breach in the Forth, or the swifts return after a winter away.
Read it slowly, then read it again. Then go back and read her other books. That's my advice.
August 23, 2024
"a bill like a long nib that could write its own epitaph. The sobbing trill gliding into silence and bone." This book has been one of my favorite's of the year, not least because of its haunting words. Jamie interwines poetry and the essay form into a seamless peice of non-fiction. Cairn captures feelings of eco-grief and eco-guilt profoundly in this way: instead of using desensitising stats / figures, her non-fiction draws upon the emotional reality of the anthropocene. She notices the moments where one can literally feel the planet slipping out of forgivable grasp and into darkness, and presents them with the vulnerability needed for one to reconnect to the Climate Crisis. Cannot recommend this book enough, it is a calling to reflect upon an Earth where soon there will be "no-one left alive to call me home".
November 2, 2024
This is a near-perfect little book. It's compact, each word, phrase, idea carefully weighted. Feel the weight of each stone/essay/poem in your hand, take pleasure in its texture and colour, its change of character in the shift of light and shadow. Cairn is a book that fills the past, the present and the future. There's despair, sadness, absurdity, joy and hope. Jamie's ability to express the world in all its complexity (and simplicity) with originality makes Cairn a pleasure to read. The beauty and majesty and harshness of the natural world weaves through the everyday of human life, all its ordinariness expressed with Jamie's wiry humour. These small stones that have built Jamie's life are ones to turn over and over in your hand; this is a book to read and reread and read again.
January 4, 2025
How fortunate I am to have been gifted this heart wrenching, beautiful book by Kathleen Jamie. I thought reading her earlier book: "Surfacing" was an amazing experience, but this surpasses it. It's a sequence of beautiful prose and poetry pieces inspired by her intricate and loving observation of the natural world around her in Scotland. After reading it, I felt that I had spent time in the company of a wonderful mind, a wonderful person. Profound sadness resonates from the pages as she reflects on the effects and further threats of the climate crisis. As she says in her epilogue: "Like a flock of starlings pursued by a falcon, the future accelerates towards us ... How do we, the citizens, face down the warmongers?" (p. 135). How indeed.
January 13, 2025
Here is another highly readable collection of short pieces of prose, with some poetry. Most are disparate; some are loosely connected to one another. Together, they once again demonstrate Jamie’s considerable powers of close observation of both herself and her world, her compassionate reflection and her remarkable deftness of expression. If each of these pieces were a slice of cake, it would have the lightness of a Victoria sponge combined with the complexity of a rich fruit loaf, a Dundee cake perhaps.
Despite its apparent simplicity, this writing is much too rich to consume in large portions; better to extend the pleasure.
Despite its apparent simplicity, this writing is much too rich to consume in large portions; better to extend the pleasure.
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