Kathleen Jamie

"A new collection of essays exploring the nature of time and place in a shrinking world, from the award-winning author of Sightlines"--

Surfacing

The author takes a fresh look at her native Scottish landscapes, before sailing north into iceberg-strewn seas. Her gaze swoops vertiginously too; from a countryside of cells beneath a hospital microscope, to killer whales rounding a headland, to the constellations of satellites that belie our sense of the remote. Written with her hallmark precision and delicacy, and marked by moments in her own life, Sightlines offers a rare invitation to pause and to pay heed to our surroundings.

Sightlines

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.

Poems

The Overhaul

It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Kathleen Jamie, award winning poet, has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer. Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.

Findings

For several years now, Kathleen Jamie's work has addressed two principal concerns; how the human negotiates with the natural world and how men and women should define their conduct with family and society.

The Tree House

Alexander McCall Smith

James Robertson

James Crawford

Alistair Moffat

Experience a new history of Scotland told through its places. Writers Kathleen Jamie, Alexander McCall Smith, Alistair Moffat, James Robertson and James Crawford pick twenty-five buildings to tell the story of the nation.Travelling across the country, from abandoned islands and lonely glens to the heart of our modern cities, these five authors seek out the diverse narrative of the Scottish people. Follow Kathleen Jamie as she searches for the traces of our first family hearths in the Cairngorms and makes a midsummer journey to Shetland to meet the unlikely new inhabitants of an Iron Age broch. Tour the wondrous and macabre Surgeons' Hall with Alexander McCall Smith, or walk with him over sacred ground to Iona's ancient Abbey. Join Alistair Moffat as he discovers a lost whisky village in the wilds of Strathconon, and climbs up through the vertiginous layers of history in Edinburgh Castle. Accompany James Robertson as he goes from the standing stones of Callanish to the humble cottage of Hugh MacDiarmid - via the engineering colossus of the Forth Rail Bridge. And journey with James Crawford from a packed crowd in Hampden Park, to an off-the-grid eco-bothy on the Isle of Eigg.Who Built Scotland is a landmark exploration of Scotland's social, political and cultural histories. Moving from Neolithic families, exiled hermits and ambitious royal dynasties to highland shieling girls, peasant poets, Enlightenment philosophers and iconoclastic artists, it places our people, our ideas and our passions at the heart of our architecture and archaeology. This is the remarkable story how we have shaped our buildings and how our buildings, in turn, have shaped us.

A History of the Nation in Twenty-Five Buildings

Who Built Scotland

Selected Poems

Peter Mackay

Don Paterson

A timeless gift edition of the greatest poetic works from Scotland's literary past, present and future. Edited by award-winning poets Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Peter Mackay

The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse

Alice Oswald

Seamus Heaney

Richard Murphy

Robert MacFarlane

Michael Longley

Derek Mahon

Sinéad Morrisey

Andrew McNellie

Deirdre Chonghaile

Archipelago Anthology

In her extraordinary 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 Company is a visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.

The Bonniest Companie

'Luminous' The Times 'Beautiful’ Caught by the River Bringing together contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens, through prose, poetry and photography. Edited and introduced by Kathleen Jamie, and with contributions from Amy Liptrot, Jim Crumley, Chitra Ramaswamy, Malachy Tallack, Amanda Thomson 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.

Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland

Antlers of Water

It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer. Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.

A Western woman shares her adventures in Northern Pakistan, where she visited romote villages and befriended local people. Original.

Everyday Life on the Frontiers of Pakistan

Among Muslims

Collective Winner of the 2019 Highland Book Prize Under the ravishing light of an Alaskan sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village to its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline, impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered. In a grandmother's disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining accident and a 'mither who was kind'. For this luminous new essay collection, acclaimed author Kathleen Jamie visits archaeological sites and mines her own memories - of her grandparents, of youthful travels - to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies, and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.

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.”

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.

"Experience a new history of Scotland told through its places. Writers Kathleen Jamie, Alexander McCall Smith, Alistair Moffat, James Robertson and James Crawford pick twenty-five buildings to tell the story of the nation.Travelling across the country, from abandoned islands and lonely glens to the heart of our modern cities, these five authors seek out the diverse narrative of the Scottish people. Follow Kathleen Jamie as she searches for the traces of our first family hearths in the Cairngorms and makes a midsummer journey to Shetland to meet the unlikely new inhabitants of an Iron Age broch. Tour the wondrous and macabre Surgeons' Hall with Alexander McCall Smith, or walk with him over sacred ground to Iona's ancient Abbey. Join Alistair Moffat as he discovers a lost whisky village in the wilds of Strathconon, and climbs up through the vertiginous layers of history in Edinburgh Castle. Accompany James Robertson as he goes from the standing stones of Callanish to the humble cottage of Hugh MacDiarmid - via the engineering colossus of the Forth Rail Bridge. And journey with James Crawford from a packed crowd in Hampden Park, to an off -the-grid eco-bothy on the Isle of Eigg. Who Built Scotland is a landmark exploration of Scotland's social, political and cultural histories. Moving from Neolithic families, exiled hermits and ambitious royal dynasties to highland sheiling girls, peasant poets, Enlightenment philosophers and iconoclastic artists, it places our people, our ideas and our passions at the heart of our architecture and archaeology. This is the remarkable story how we have shaped our buildings and how our buildings, in turn, have shaped us." -- provided by publisher.

Andrew Greig

Set in the almost mythical summer of 1940, A Flame in Your Heart tells the story of the al-too-brief love of a Spitfire pilot and his girl. Written by two young Scottish poets born after the War, A Flame in Your Heart was broadcast on Radio 4. Its 'intense' atmosphere earned praise in The Times: 'The true feel of the period was there.' For Catherine Lockerbie, writing in The Scotsman, it was a 'languid' atmosphere: 'A most beautiful and musically constructed gaze at life and death over the ripening fields and above the strawberries.'

A Flame in Your Heart

Lilias Fraser

Jamie's poetry is intelligent and subtle, her language inventive and refreshing. This is a wide-ranging selection. It reveals the generous range of her concerns, from life in the wilder parts of Pakistan and Tibet, to the difficult questions of identity posed in the celebrated Queen of Sheba.

Kathleen Jamie

Books

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