Kathleen Jamie’s first poetry pamphlet, written when she was 19, won the Eric Gregory Award, and her subsequent collections of poetry and essays have come to be regarded as classics of environmental writing. Now 60, and no longer seduced by the sublime, as she looks over her shoulder at the receding backs of her parents, and contemplates the future she is handing on to her children, she finds the prospect fraught with uncertainty.
“Life moves on but also spirals round,” she notes in the prologue to Cairn, which revisits themes and locations that have characterised her work for the last 40 years, from insightful studies of birds and cetaceans to accounts of social activism, but without the confidence in the regenerative ability of the natural world that underpinned her previous work.
“If we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive. How to write a lyric poem?” This question is both posed and exemplified in the new collection. Moving away from longer and more recognisable forms, Cairn combines prose fragments, poems and micro-essays. This fragmentary approach is a fitting reflection of our existence in the post-Covid world, where the ability to focus has been compromised by the ubiquity of mobile devices, and news comes in an unstoppable stream of soundbites, little of it positive.
[ New poetry: All Souls; Into the Night that Flies So Fast; We Go On; Baby SchemaOpens in new window ]
Every generation, as it approaches the turn towards the horizon, suspects that the world has gone to pieces, but perhaps this has never been a more accurate summation than today, faced with roaring climate change and global instability. Jamie’s epigraph, taken from John Berger, suggests “stones propose another sense of time, whereby the past, the deep past of the planet, proffers a meagre yet massive support to acts of human resistance”.
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The fragments that Cairn comprises are presented as a collection of stones with the potential to constitute a trail marker. Subtle pencil drawings by Miek Zwamborn complement an unsettling text. Cairn is a book of shredded contracts and torn-up roadmaps, in which the age-old anxieties of late middle age blend with the acute solastalgia of the Anthropocene. In it, we accompany Jamie into the unknown, certain only that “whatever changes there will be, a new order will emerge as has happened throughout the deep past”.
