Surfacing, by Kathleen Jamie
By Kathleen Jamie Sort of Books £12.99
Surfacing
One might say of Kathleen Jamie that her prose is poetic, as long as one expects nothing that’s even the lightest shade of purple.
She is pre-eminent in her generation of Scottish poets, and poetry has taught her concision, lightness and attention to the sound of the human voice in its splendid ordinariness. The essays
in this new volume, Surfacing, exhibit the full range of what she can do. There are several short pieces that only the absence of line breaks stops from counting as poems.
Interspersed among them are three long essays – about Alaska, Orkney and Tibet – that could well have been padded out to be entire books, if Jamie could allow herself the self-indulgence of padding.
Her subjects are disparate, but her title tells us to look out for a recurring motif. ‘Surfacing’ is the title of an essay that begins with a family story of her great-grandfather, a miner, who ‘was caught in a blast and brought to the surface with a sheet laid over him with holes cut for his eyes’.
But other things come, or are brought, to the surface in these essays. Dead things: bears from 46,000 years ago, houses and ploughshares of Neolithic settlers in Orkney and long-lost artefacts of the Yup’ik people of Alaska. Her long accounts of the latter two excavations are the volume’s twin centrepieces.
Living things also surface in these pages: seals from the sea, salmon in streams and eagles (or are they in fact buzzards?) from behind clouds. Other things surface in less obvious ways: memories of youth, a worrying lump under the skin and the sudden echo of a long-dead grandmother’s voice.
Jamie is, in the best sense, an unromantic. With her, it seems to go without saying that landscapes, past and present, have always been places of work, as when she observes during an archaeological dig of ‘the ugly, gruntinglooking stone ploughshares’ that they ‘spoke of hard labour, not of decoration’. The dig in Orkney, she says, reveals not the intrepid explorings of a ‘pioneer generation’ landing on the islands from the Scottish mainland, but rather ‘the daily getting-on-with-it that most of us inhabit’.
In all this, there is a larger political
vision, articulated with a flinty realism and melancholy that make way every now and then for hope and something like activism, even if only the writerly activism of bearing witness to loss.
She feels for the early settlers of Orkney, whose culture seems to have vanished after the coming of the Vikings. She sees in the struggles of contemporary Native Americans in Alaska and dissidents in China the odd glimpse of resistance, even as they see their cultures besieged, and their landscapes eroded, flooded or melting.
Every page is a lesson in how to do it: how to write of the sublime without effusion; how to bring the self into the writing without narcissism. She is generous in sharing her perceptions of other people and landscapes but guarded with her self-revelations, aware of the
indecorousness of talking about an unhappy marriage, a family bereavement or a cancer scare while around her Tibetan monks are being disappeared, Native Americans are forgetting their languages and whole islands are disappearing under water.
Her vocabulary is varied, unselfconscious and striking: kye; marram; dinked; smirr. She can capture whole lives – whole ways of life – in a sentence: some Tibetans she observes have ‘eyes crinkled after years of sun and dungsmoke’. And animals: an eagle in the sky is ‘a black hyphen above the near-bare crest of the hill’. And, one need hardly add, landscapes, which she knows better than to treat as if they come pre-described.
If she ever reaches for the stock phrase, she is quick to spot it. When
she describes a shed as ‘derelict-looking’, she corrects herself at once: ‘That’s lazy.’ It matters to her whether it is a fisherman’s store or a smokehouse for salmon or a maqiq (sauna). It matters to her to look again; to see better.
Watching cranes stalking through the grasses, she exclaims, ‘the grasses were so vibrant I could almost taste them. This, after only an hour of attention. What would a year be like, a lifetime, a thousand years?’
A page of Jamie’s prose is enough to effect what she calls a ‘change in the texture of [one’s] attention’. The earth and sky feel larger, sadder and more beautiful.