Surfacing ing

by byKa Kathleen Jamie Sort of Books

Sep 2019 201 £12.99 pp256 p hb isbn 9781908745811 978

When I recall researching in Edinburgh, I hear Kathleen Jamie’s poem Arraheids: “The museums of Scotland are wrang/They urnae arraheids/but a show o grannies’ tongues”, muttering, “ye arenae here tae wonder,/whae dae ye think ye ur?” ( The Queen of Sheba, 1994). Surfacing, a prose collection dominated by two excavations, has the same power of language and imagery, the humour, and the informed interest in archaeology that memorably overturns the familiar. The journey begins

in the Bone Caves near Inchnadamph, with a glance back to ice ages and forward to the climate crisis. She goes to Quinhagak, Alaska, where archaeologists are working with locals to record remains endangered by thawing permafrost (feature May/Jun 2014/136), and she trowels at the Links of Noltland in Orkney (feature Jul/Aug 2010/113), looking, talking and listening. In these and other essays the point of archaeology, of the past in our lives, is gently, beautifully dissected. MP