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| Cairn by Kathleen Jamie |
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.
The introduction sets the scene with a somewhat bittersweet tone and self-mocking note, gently making fun of Kathleen's own earnestness of youth – now writing to us from the other side of a threshold of age, where one becomes 'more hander-on of the world than its inheritor'. How lucky for us to have honest notes from someone who observes and sends letters, to let us know what it's like. This handing over, this changing of the guards runs through the book like an undercurrent, through climate protests and summit trips. Her fear for the future, and future generations is palpable throughout. But it is also a sort of taking us by the hand, pulling us forward, gently into action.
Her short-form writing is beautiful, like a collection of trinkets on one's windowsill, and on my first read I already read everything twice. In fact, I pick up other books to intentionally slow my pace. I don't want to read it all at once, and I know it's not enough, anyway; I return to reread it all, not in order this time, in and out of sentiments and snapshots of images beautifully conjured in such few words.
A sense of mourning lingers in these fragments, farewells to the departed and especially to one's young self. Kathleen is such a wonderful weaver, connecting with ease the muddy hillside springs ('if even they had run dry, what then?') to an all-encompassing sense of loneliness, '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 mourns and fears for the future and the planet, and writes tender reminiscences of an age where this mourning didn't yet penetrate our every waking thought. 'Envy us, infants in an undisfeatured world.' In phone wires and raindrops, she sees our entire past and future, and this is what makes her writing so exceptional. Her perspective, too; in 'Peregrines', she becomes the predator, her eyes zooming into the small detail and zooming out again, experiencing being the one with the threatening aura. In 'The Mirror', from a fallen mirror, to a Pictish stone, to a lakeside, back to the mirror again in one fell swoop, somehow changed.
Every description is worth cherishing, and I enjoy them immensely for their singularity, their rejection of sentimentality: 'The flash of gold is the same blaze of winter sunset mirrored in a puddle. The flare and die, the feathering dark.' And, often, a wry smile, an aside firmly rooting us back in reality: 'Suddenly we're stood watching a big fat metaphor.' Her tone of darkness and humour, so well intertwined, is what makes me love her even more. She raps her own knuckles. The truth is, no one out there writes quite like this.
There are pieces of poetry too, which add to the feeling of the cairn: the placing of stones of various shapes and sizes, on our way to somewhere. They complete the collection that reflects Kathleen deeply, personally.
This book feels as much a piece of literary mastery as a plea or prayer or warning. Kathleen doesn't want to settle comfortably in beauty. A piece about a simple flint, another about avian influenza makes me well up. 'What use is the summer sunlight, if it can't gleam on a gannet's back?'
'We can't stand around like innocents, slightly unsettled, scrolling on, wishing things were "back to normal"', she warns. So, perhaps, Cairn is a marker of a path, an invitation to follow on – or even just to set out and peek around the next bend.
