07/08/2019
In a lyrical, beautifully rendered collection of essays, poet Jamie (Sightlines) meditates on the natural world, lost cultures, and the passage of time. The book’s title relates most directly to its two longest (and most philosophically engaging) pieces, both about archaeological digs. For “In Quinhagak,” Jamie travels to a small Alaskan village to help with collecting artifacts from the period before the arrival of Europeans. Seeing how “the past can spill out of the earth, become the present,” she immerses herself in the way of life of the local Yup’ik, who are deeply knowledgeable about their natural surroundings and acutely present in the moment. In “Links of Noltland,” she visits the Scottish town of Pierowall, where archaeologists are uncovering Neolithic and Bronze Age dwellings, producing information about “ordinary people’s ordinary lives” from millennia ago. Yet, Jamie insists, “those people’s days were as long and vital as ours.” Later, in “The Wind Horse,” Jamie recalls traveling to Tibet in 1989 and hearing fragmentary reports of the Beijing student protests, distressing information that she juxtaposes against the tranquility of a Buddhist monastery. Jamie’s observations about time and the interconnectedness of human lives, past and present, are insightful, and her language elegant. The result is a stirring collection for poetry and prose readers alike. George Lucas, Inkwell Management. (Sept.)
Shortlisted for the 2020 Highland Book Prize
“[Kathleen Jamie’s] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over — not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth’s, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest.” —Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, “By the Book” in the New York Times Book Review.
“Splendid… Jamie’s crisp language places you in a near-meditative state.” —Monica Drake, The New York Times Book Review
“Jamie connects the relics of distant ages with the daily routines in front of her…. Jamie appears more gregarious than Thoreau and most other nature writers. While the genre is deeply populated by solitaries, her essays brim with people.” —Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal
"Throughout it all, the reader encounters passages of breathtaking beauty [...] though Jamie always finds herself relentlessly tugged away from primordial beauty toward anxieties of the modern world and a looming sense of catastrophe, the immediacy of her surroundings giving way to a geologic sense of time." —Ernest Hilbert, The Washington Post
“Like her previous works, Surfacing is rich in connections and observations that grant the reader new ways of seeing …. Jamie excavates long-forgotten memories in some, and then writes of two very different digs in northern lands that are as stark and beautiful as any nature writing but also witty and well-peopled – qualities less typical of the genre.” —Patrick Barkham, The Guardian
"Kathleen Jamie's stories of what the earth revels as our coastlines erode pose a profoundly important question: what is it that our civilization has lost sight of and might the artifacts uncovered there help us to heal our relationships with each other and the more-than-human world? To read Surfacing is to travel in the company of a curious and dear friend, equally attuned to the hawk on the horizon as she is to the ground beneath her feet." —Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
"In Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie—one of Scotland’s leading poets and an exquisite prose writer—tracks travel observations and reflects on the passage of time. The book is stoked with her precise, often arresting language. [...] It is Jamie’s keen and quiet power of observation and her affection for the big story of the human species that seem to me the most bracing tonic for our contentious times." —Alison Hawthorne Deming, Science Magazine
"In Surfacing there is a poet’s economy with words, a stripped clarity… she shows throughout this astonishing work, it is in looking — attuning ourselves to nature and culture, past and present — that we find our compass." —Barbra Kiser, Nature Magazine
"Surfacing is a great companion for autumn’s natural melancholy and meditative feel. Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie weaves together lucid essays about aging, archaeology, travel, and the erosion of natural resources and sacred wild places. She captures that end-of-summer sadness, when you’re taking stock of your year and slowing down as the days get shorter. The book is about changing landscapes and human impact, but it’s also about memory and paying attention, as she visits Ice Age caves and rides on high-speed trains. It’s a series of tight visual scenes, beautifully told, and it’s worth blocking out an afternoon to spend time with." —Outside
“Jamie’s writing has a deceptive simplicity: its powers are cumulative. Her way is to build impressionistic detail by recounting conversations, travels, observations of the natural world, and then carefully layer it in. It is its own kind of archaeology. Every now and then, however, she cuts through the assemblage of beautiful prose with a stinging comment: a reminder that the natural balance is out of whack, or that violence and menace can surface just as easily as venerable artefacts from the past.” —Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia, in the New Statesman
"In a lyrical, beautifully rendered collection of essays, poet Jamie (Sightlines) meditates on the natural world, lost cultures, and the passage of time….Jamie’s observations about time and the interconnectedness of human lives, past and present, are insightful, and her language elegant. The result is a stirring collection for poetry and prose readers alike.” —Publishers Weekly
"Surfacing is a book whose impact is accretive and, eventually, astonishing … It’s wonderful writing, testing the limits of nonfiction." —Alex Preston, The Guardian
"This is a beautiful book, and a wise one. It invites feeling and thought." —The Scotsman
"With language so thrilling it makes all other writing feel insipid for a while…Jamie’s powers of observation have not flagged. She continues to conjure up heart stopping images…It is the little details Jamie picks up on that makes these essays so touching.” —The Big Issue
Praise for Kathleen Jamie:
“A sorceress of the essay form. Never exotic, down to earth, she renders the indefinable to the reader’s ear. Hold her tangible words and they’ll take you places.” —John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and About Looking
“The leading Scottish poet of her generation.” —The Sunday Times (London)
2019-08-26
A dozen artfully written, linguistically delicate essays about the natural world by the acclaimed poet.
Jamie (Creative Writing/Univ. of Stirling; Selected Poems, 2019, etc.) isn't quite a traditional essayist, but she's a very fine storyteller. Here, she offers her quiet reflections on travels through her native Scotland, Alaska, and elsewhere. The collection opens with "The Reindeer Cave," which finds the author contemplating the Ice Age. "You realize you haven't a clue," she writes. "We can wait, say the hills. Take your time." And she does, reflecting on things as simple as a train journey toward Aberdeen ("A Reflection") or the barren beauty of Alaska ("In Quinhagak") reflected in her observation of an archaeological dig. It can be something as simple as a glimpse of an eagle, soaring in all its majesty, or as sprawling as "The Links of Noltland," a two-part essay that contains such cheeky observations as, "if seals could watch Netflix, they would." Mostly, though, Jamie is observant, reflective, and poignant in her prose. "The Inevitable Pagoda" might as well be a poem in its own right, while the title essay reflects on the voices we all lose to history over time. Even the memory of being bitten by a dog can contain multitudes: "I had my traveling adventure, came home, a quarter century passed. Partners were met and children were born and grew. Friendships were forged and lost. Jobs, projects, homes, bereavements, the stuff of life—if we're spared. The undammed rush of life. If we're spared." Punctuated by photographs and relatable to any human being who feels a connection to nature, Jamie's writing is complex yet modest, reflecting on generations past and future, the nature of time, and what to hang on to as well as what to let go.
A beautiful portrait of a fleeting moment in time on planet Earth.
09/01/2019
Scottish poet Jamie (creative writing, Univ. Stirling; Sightlines), winner of the John Burroughs Medal, has penned a series of essays that combine memoir, archaeology, natural history, and travelog. The principal pieces chronicle her participation in two archaeological digs and a visit to a Tibetan village in China during the time of the Tiananmen Square protests. Her interest in Inuit objects leads her to Quinhagak, AK, where she participates as a volunteer in a dig to uncover Yup'ik artifacts more than 500 years old. The author explores the tundra and the culture of Yup'ik peoples, both past and present. In Westray, one of the Orkney Islands of Scotland, she helps discover villages of Bronze Age and Neolithic farmers while contemplating the past and present-day lives of the people who live there. As a young woman, she explores Xiahe, an ethnically Tibetan town in China, reflecting on the current events the region is experiencing. VERDICT A fascinating, lyrical, wide-ranging work sharing thoughts on past and present that will appeal to a wide range of readers, including those interested in memoirs and reflections on the world around us.—Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL
