Findings [Paperback]

This is a beautiful collection of essays, evocative, poetic, humane and rooted. The reader is cradled by the style, taught to look and to see and above all appreciate a sense of place and context. It can be highly recommended to anyone in need of refreshment from grind or grime.

I bought this book because I felt a deep sense of gratitude for Kathleen Jamie's 'Among Muslims'; she is one of a few writers I buy automatically. This collection has not disappointed. The essays have at their core a passion for Scotland the wild, the home but not romantic or rose-tinted. The issues she raises from within herself are relevant to any human location. The stresses and strains of mans relationship with the environment are described in a context that is clear and meaningful. By the end the essays have shown the reader to see and view the environment with a poignant reality rare in books of any sort. This is an inspiring enviromental appreciation and its gentle understanding of the complex facets involved in these debates is unique; no bullying tone but a clear and deep gratitude for surrounding both natural and man-made. Begging nothing more than an aware, sensitive and achievable response from the reader.

The language is poetic and resonant. My husband has gone blind quite recently and I am often on the look out for books that are visually strong enough for him to enjoy. I read the first chapter to him, its subject, Darkness and Light was beautifully evocative of a place we had visited when he had more sight. Yet we agreed had you not visited these places you would still feel enchanted and drawn towards them.

The 'essay' style of the collection is also attractive. Busy family life can preclude long complicated reads, especially in summer. These essays are related but clearly individual a great asset when perpetual interruptions of, for example, children at home prevent longer studious reads. They would be a wonderful companion on a journey or daily commute or when short time spans are all that is available. Yet the writing is no less challenging for this, I used a dictionary more often than usual! I enjoyed being schooled in bits of Scots dialect and Norse entymology! At times the observations are slightly personal and sympathetically comforting, but this is not autobiography. This weaving of Kathleen Jamie's own experiences into her historical surroundings is engaging on a number of levels and encourages us to look again at simple things close at hand be they urban or rural.

Having read this I left it by my bed. I came home more than once during the month that followed keen to re-read an extract knowing that I had just seen something mentioned in Findings. The writing stays with you, it is clear and beautiful. Having never read poetry I feel inspired to read some of Kathleen Jamie's own poetry, it might be accessible.

At any level an inspiring and beautiful read and I hope that my busy somewhat menial life will continue to be enhanced by her even busier teaching and writing life, one to watch I think!

A Life Less Ordinary

Kathleen Jamie is a rare talent. She has travelled widely, Tibet, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in a scared world drawn in upon itself, written compassionately about the people she has met. She is one of Scotland's foremost contemporary poets whose poems explore the profundity of the everyday. She draws connections not from the insignificant to the profound, but sees within the ordinary the essential. Reading her is a delight. Her writing suggests that you could leave your children with her for the day knowing that they would not only be safe, but would probably be eager to visit again. She has no need for the bile and withering sarcasm of the alpha males of the literary world. You won't have to wipe spittle of your chin while staring into the angry eyes of a Will Self, or watch your back while an Amis is around.

Her latest book `Findings' is a series of essays, a gentle ramble around her homeland. Although domestic and whimsical, delighting in random insignificant details such as a plastic doll's head on a Hebridean beach, in her quiet way she explores the significance of the mundane, charting the drama and complexity of ordinary life.

She is evidently a restless soul finding reasons to travel. The places she chooses are usually on the margins of modern society; highland sheilings, deserted Hebridean Islands, Maes Howe in Orkney or watching corncrakes on Coll. But these are not places to hide from the horrors of the modern world but rather vantages points providing a descant to its muzak. In the eponymous essay `Findings' in the chance company of BBC sound recordists she visits the Monarch Islands admitting that she has never heard off them before. Tim and Martin are keen to record bird song. Jamie trawls through the debris on the beach, traffic bollards, shampoo and milk cartons, odd trainers and a dead whale. She collects two bleached sticks, a gannet's beak and a whale vertebrae, memorials to the natural world. She then notes her regret at not adding the plastic dolls head to her collection and points out that New Zealand has plastic beaches `100,000 grains to the square metre' and that an otter has been found in the Hebrides garrotted by plastic tape. This is not escapism rather viewing the modern world from a novel perspective.

The shepherd has a quad bike rather than collies.

We can live with fly blown Glasgow high rise tenements knee deep in rubbish but that the detritus of modern life washes up on a remote Hebridean beach seems shocking. Kathleen Jamie's genius is to leave us asking why.

The opening essay is a remarkable reflection on darkness and light. She makes the case for the dark:

`Pity the dark: we're so concerned to overcome and banish it, its crammed full of all that's devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stairs.'

She wants to see the dark as a natural phenomena:

`to enter into the dark for the love of its texture and wild intimacy'.

She notes that the old metaphor is wearing out. She goes to Orkney and visits Maes Howe the Neolithic chamber built to celebrate the turn of the year and the beginning of the end of winter's dark. She finds it full of surveyors from Historic Scotland with computerise laser scanning and pulse radar equipment. Her guide tells her `We're on the web you know. Live. Don't go picking your nose.'

The essays also deal with the mundane and the macabre; family illness and a visit to the `Surgeons Hall' in Edinburgh. No single event is allowed to remain on its own but is thrown into relief , a perspective privileged from a different place. The practicalities of her `Nana's' move into a nursing home is balanced with a trip to Lewis where she ponders the mystery of an ancient building on a stack and observes a deer cull. The various, apparently random elements of each essay are pulled together with the poet's craft, each reflecting on the other.

She embodies the spirit of the Romantics: `On man on Nature and on Human life musing in solitude.' Everything derives from and leads back to nature and the continuity of human experience.

Hers is a gentle touch and an original profundity deepening our understanding of the world by the connections her poetic imagination makes.

I was a little disappointed by Findings, having bought it on the strength of prior reviews. It's written in delicate, straightforward prose, with occasional moments of beautiful observation, and with some laugh-out-loud descriptions too, which were a real pleasure to read. Findings is a collection of essays about the natural world, our common day-to-day lives, and our strange juxtaposition with nature. There's nothing new in what Jamie says - these aren't philosophical essays or encouragements to deeper thought about nature. Jamie's central point is to encourage us to pay closer to attention to nature, and she persuades by doing so herself, and writing with as close an eye as she can. By far the strongest essay in the collection actually takes place indoors, when she visits the museum collection of a hospital. It's a strange, intoxicating moment, which creates a powerful atmosphere. However, the essays seem like a series of extended pieces of journalism. She uses the same technique to frame each of them, so that after a while, rather than reading like an unfolding perspective on nature, they become a bit predictable.