Kathleen Jamie’s third essay collection, Surfacing, is a quieter, gentler work than her earlier volumes: 2005’s Findings and 2012’s Sightlines. It’s perhaps fitting – this is a book mostly written in, as she puts it, “late middle age”, when her children have grown and the view back is longer than the view forward. Surfacing is the literary equivalent of the slow food movement: writing that may describe momentous events – the death of Jamie’s father; her own cancer diagnosis and treatment; a 500-year-old massacre; the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations that ended in Tiananmen Square – but does so in a manner that is sidelong, subtle and requires a degree of readerly patience.
There’s no doubt that this is the work of the same author as those earlier collections, though. First, there’s the quality of the noticing eye, the poet’s ability to look deeply at a landscape, a person, a situation, and then to summon it on the page with what Robert Lowell called “the grace of accuracy”. Then there’s Jamie’s particular talent for nature writing, the way that she weaves eagles, ragwort, snow buntings, caribou and all the rest of the natural world into her prose so that they lose the otherness that can distance them from our experience. Nature in Jamie’s writing is immediate, domestic and, well, natural.
Related: Kathleen Jamie: a life in writing
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