Kathleen Jamie wrote her first book of poetry at age 19, which won the Eric Gregory Prize, and subsequent collections of poems and essays have come to be regarded as classics of environmental literature. Now at age 60 and no longer seduced by the sublime, she looks back at her parents’ receding backs and ponders the future she will pass on to her children, a prospect fraught with uncertainty.
“Life moves, but it also spirals,” she writes in the introduction to Cairn. In this book she revisits the themes and places that have informed her research over the past four decades, from insightful studies of birds and cetaceans to chronicling social movements, but without the faith in the regenerative capacity of the natural world that underpinned those earlier efforts.
[ Alvy Carragher: ‘Poetry seems to pull out and piece together the heart of the matter’ ]
“If we’re entering a period of great disintegration, lyric poetry can hardly be expected to survive. How do we write lyric poetry?” This question is posed and illustrated in the new collection. Moving away from longer, more recognisable forms, Cairn combines prose fragments, poems and micro-essays. This fragmented approach is an apt reflection of our existence in a post-COVID world, where concentration is impaired by the omnipresence of mobile devices and the news flows in an unstoppable stream of soundbites, most of which are not positive.
[ New poetry: All Souls; Into the Night that Flies So Fast; We Go On; Baby Schema ]
Every generation suspects that the world has fallen apart as it approaches the horizon, but this has never been more aptly summed up than today, in the face of rampant climate change and global instability. Jamie’s inscription, taken from John Berger, suggests that “stones offer an alternative sense of time, whereby the past, the distant past of the earth, offers subtle but significant support to human acts of resistance.”
The fragments that make up the Cairn are presented as a collection of stones that could serve as guideposts. Mieke Zwanborn’s delicate pencil drawings complement the unsettling text. A book filled with shredded contracts and ripped road maps, Cairn blends the age-old anxieties of the late Middle Ages with the intense solastalgia of the Anthropocene. In this book, we journey with Jamie into the unknown. One thing is certain: “Whatever change there may be, a new order will emerge, as it did long ago.”
