See when it all unravels—the entire project
reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor'wester;
d'you ever imagine chasing just one strand, letting it lead you
to an unsung cleft in a rock, a place you could take to,
dig yourself in—but what are the chances of that?
Of the birds,
few remain all winter; half a dozen waders
mediate between sea and shore, that space confirmed—don't laugh—by your own work.
—from "Materials"
The Overhaul continues Kathleen Jamie's lyric inquiry into the aspects of the world our rushing lives elide, and even threaten. Whether she is addressing birds or rivers, or the need to accept loss, or, sometimes, the desire to escape our own lives, her poetry is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender. The Overhaul is a midlife book of repair, restitution, and ultimately hope—of the wisest and most worldly kind.
See when it all unravels—the entire project
reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor'wester;
d'you ever imagine chasing just one strand, letting it lead you
to an unsung cleft in a rock, a place you could take to,
dig yourself in—but what are the chances of that?
Of the birds,
few remain all winter; half a dozen waders
mediate between sea and shore, that space confirmed—don't laugh—by your own work.
—from "Materials"
The Overhaul continues Kathleen Jamie's lyric inquiry into the aspects of the world our rushing lives elide, and even threaten. Whether she is addressing birds or rivers, or the need to accept loss, or, sometimes, the desire to escape our own lives, her poetry is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender. The Overhaul is a midlife book of repair, restitution, and ultimately hope—of the wisest and most worldly kind.
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Overview
See when it all unravels—the entire project
reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor'wester;
d'you ever imagine chasing just one strand, letting it lead you
to an unsung cleft in a rock, a place you could take to,
dig yourself in—but what are the chances of that?
Of the birds,
few remain all winter; half a dozen waders
mediate between sea and shore, that space confirmed—don't laugh—by your own work.
—from "Materials"
The Overhaul continues Kathleen Jamie's lyric inquiry into the aspects of the world our rushing lives elide, and even threaten. Whether she is addressing birds or rivers, or the need to accept loss, or, sometimes, the desire to escape our own lives, her poetry is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender. The Overhaul is a midlife book of repair, restitution, and ultimately hope—of the wisest and most worldly kind.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555977023 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2015 |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Sales rank: | 702,029 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.48(w) x 8.19(h) x 0.23(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Overhaul
Poems
By Kathleen Jamie
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2012 Kathleen JamieAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-702-3
CHAPTER 1
The Beach
Now this big westerly's
blown itself out,
let's drive to the storm beach.
A few brave souls
will be there already,
eyeing the driftwood,
the heaps of frayed
blue polyprop rope,
cut loose, thrown back at us –
What a species –
still working the same
curved bay, all of us
hoping for the marvellous,
all hankering for a changed life.
The Dash
Every mid-February
those first days arrive
when the sun rises
higher than the Black
Hill at last. Brightness
and a crazy breeze
course from the same airt –
turned clods gleam, the trees'
topmost branches bend
shivering downwind.
They chase, this lithe pair
out of the far south
west, and though scalding
to our wintered eyes
look, we cry, it's here
Five Tay Sonnets
1. OSPREYS
You'll be wondering why you bothered: beating
up from Senegal, just to hit a teuchit storm –
late March blizzards and raw winds – before the tilt
across the A9, to arrive, mere
hours apart, at the self-same riverside
Scots pine, and possess again the sticks and fishbones
of last year's nest: still here, pretty much
like the rest of us – gale-battered, winter-worn,
half toppled away ...
So redd up your cradle, on the tree-top,
claim your teind from the shining
estates of the firth, or the trout-stocked loch.
What do you care? Either way,
there'll be a few glad whispers round town today:
that's them, baith o' them, they're in.
2. SPRINGS
Full March moon and gale-force easters, the pair of them
sucking and shoving the river
back into its closet in the hills, or trying to. Naturally
the dykes failed, the town's last fishing boat
raved at the pier-head, then went down; diesel-
corrupted water cascaded into front-yards, coal-holes, garages,
and there's naethin ye can dae,
said the old boys, the sages, which may be true; but river –
what have you left us? Evidence of an inner life, secrets
of your estuarine soul hawked halfway
up Shore Street, up East and Mid Shore, and arrayed
in swags all through the swing-park: plastic trash and broken
reeds,
driftwood, bust TVs ...
and a salmon,
dead, flung beneath the see-saw, the crows are onto at once.
3. MAY
Again the wild blossom
powering down at dusk, the gean trees
a lather at the hillfoot
and a blackbird, telling us
what he thinks to it, telling us
what he thinks ...
How can we bear it? A fire-streaked sky, a firth
decked in gold, the grey clouds passing
like peasant-folk
lured away by a prophecy.
What can we say
the blackbird's failed
to iterate already? Night calls:
the windows of next-door's glass house
crimson, then go mute
4. EXCAVATION & RECOVERY
Then specialists arrived, in hi-viz jackets and hardhats
who floundered out every low tide
to the log-boat, lodged
in the mud since the Bronze Age. Eventually
it was floated to the slipway, swung high
in front of our eyes: black, dripping, aboriginal
– an axe-hewn hollowed-out oak
sent to the city on a truck.
What were you to them, river, who hollered
'Shipping water!' or 'Ca' canny lads!' in some now
long-forgotten tongue?
an estuary with a discharge of 160 cubic metres of water per second
as per the experts' report?
or Tay/Toi/Taum – a goddess;
the Flowing(?), the Silent One(?).
5. 'DOING AWAY'
Nowhere to go, nowhere I'd rather be
than here, fulfilling my daily rituals.
Why would one want
to absent oneself, when one's commute
is a lonely hillside by-way, high
above the river? Specially when the tide's
way out, leaving the firth
like a lovers' bed with the sheets stripped back
baring its sandbanks, its streamy rivulets,
– the whole thing shining
like an Elfland, and all a mere two fields'
stumbling walk away ...
Someday I'll pull into a passing-place
a mile from home, and leave the car,
when they find it
engine thrumming quietly
Fragment 1
Roe deer,
breaking from a thicket
bounding over briars
between darkening trees
you don't even glance
at the cause of your doubt
so how can you tell
what form I take?
What form I take
I scarcely know myself
adrift in a wood
in wintertime at dusk
always a deer
breaking from a thicket
for a while now
this is how it's been
Fragment 2
Imagine we could begin
all over again; begin
afresh, like this February
dawn light, coaxing
from the Scots pines
their red ochre, burnt-earth glow.
All over again. South
– facing mountainsides, balcony
above balcony of pines – imagine
we could mend
whatever we heard fracture:
splintering of wood, a bird's
cry over still water, a sound
only reaching us now
The Longhouse
Who lives here? Don't
you remember that hill? How it
shut out any winter sun –
or those ash trees
sheltering the gable end?
Hefted to its own land
like its few yowes –
Today the wind's swung north –
in overcoats and headscarves
two women are crossing the yard
As if yoked together,
they stall, and turn to face us –
and though you look
from one to the other,
one to the other,
you just can't tell
which is daughter, which mother ...
This is what happens.
This is why we loosed our grip and fled
like the wind-driven smoke
from the single lum
in the crooked roof that covers
both women and beasts, a roof
low and broken like a cry
The Study
Moon,
what do you mean,
entering my study
like a curiosity shop,
stroking in mild concern
the telescope mounted
on its tripod, the books,
the attic stair? You
who rise by night, who draw
the inescapable world
closer, a touch,
to your gaze – why
query me? What's mine
is yours; but you've no more
need of those implements
than a deer has,
browsing in a glade.
Moon, your work-
worn face bright
outside unnerves me.
Please, be on your way.
Hawk and Shadow
I watched a hawk
glide low across the hill,
her own dark shape
in her talons like a kill.
She tilted her wings,
fell into the air –
the shadow coursed on
without her, like a hare.
Being out of sorts
with my so-called soul,
part unhooked hawk,
part shadow on parole,
I played fast and loose:
keeping one in sight
while forsaking the other.
The hawk gained height:
her mate on the ground
began to fade,
till hill and sky were empty,
and I was afraid.
The Stags
This is the multitude, the beasts
you wanted to show me, drawing me
upstream, all morning up through wind-
scoured heather to the hillcrest.
Below us, in the next glen, is the grave
calm brotherhood, descended
out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling
like the signatories of a covenant;
their weighty, antique-polished antlers
rising above the vegetation
like masts in a harbour, or city spires.
We lie close together, and though the wind
whips away our man-and-woman smell, every
stag-face seems to look toward us, toward,
but not to us: we're held, and hold them,
in civil regard. I suspect you'd
hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight
our shared country, lead me deeper
into what you know, but loath
to cause fear you're already moving
quietly away, sure I'll go with you,
as I would now, almost anywhere.
Highland Sketch
Another landscape,
another swept glen,
more roadside wildflowers
breezing through their season
and round the next bend
– lo! another sea-loch
shot with nets of aquamarine ...
We're old enough, dear friend,
not to need to explain, not,
at least, to each other:
– sufficient years between us
to recognize, raked
down the threadbare hillsides
long-forsaken lazy-beds
where a crop was raised.
– We don't make love,
we read a while,
leaf through a book
of 19th century photographs:
hands like stones,
shy, squinting faces
admonish us.
We really ought to rouse ourselves
to greet some weather –
now westlin' winds, now shrouded bens
now a late sklent of sunlight to the heart.
A Raised Beach
– of course, that's what –
a plain of stones, perfectly
smooth and still
showing the same slight
ridges and troughs
as thousands of years ago
when the sea left.
– It is a sea – even grey
stones one can
walk across: not a
solitary flower, nor a single
blade of grass –
I know this place
– all with one face
accepting of the sun
the other ... Moon,
why have you turned to me
your dark side, why am I
examining these stones?
Our friendship lapsed.
– And sea, dear mother,
retreating with long stealth
though I lie awake –
Ah, you're a grown-up now
I've sung to you
quite long enough.
Swifts
When we first emerged, we assumed
what we'd entered
was the world,
and we its only creatures.
Soon, we could fly; soon
we'd mastered its grey gloom,
could steal a single
waterdrop
even as it fell.
Now you who hesitate,
fearful of the tomb-smell,
fearful of shades,
look up – higher!
How deft we are,
how communicative, our
scorch-brown wings almost
translucent against the blue.
Deserts, moonlit oceans, heat
climbing from a thousand coastal cities
are as nothing now,
say our terse screams.
The cave-dark we were born in
calls us back.
The Spider
When I appear to you
by dark, descended
not from heaven, but the lowest
branch of the walnut tree
bearing no annunciation,
suspended like a slub
in the air's weave
and you shriek, you shriek
so prettily, I'm reminded
of the birds – don't birds also
cultivate elaborate beauty, devour
what catches their eye?
Hence my night shift,
my sulphur-and-black-striped
jacket – poison – a lie
to cloak me while, exposed,
I squeeze from my own gut
the one material.
Who tore the night?
Who caused this rupture?
You, staring in horror
– had you never considered
how the world sustains?
The ants by day
clearing, clearing,
the spiders mending endlessly –
The Gather
The minute the men
ducked through the bothy door
they switched to English.
Even among themselves
they spoke English now,
out of courtesy,
and set about breakfast:
bread, bacon and sweet tea.
And are we enjoying
this weather, and whose
boat brought us, and what
part of the country – exactly –
would we be from ourselves?
– The tenant, ruddy-faced;
a strong bashful youngster,
and two old enough
to be their uncles,
who, planted at the wooden table
seemed happy for a bit crack:
– one with a horse-long,
marvellous weather
and nicotine-scored face
under a felt fedora,
whose every sentence
was a slow sea-wave
raking unhurriedly back
through the rounded
grey stones
at the landing place
where their boat was tied.
Beyond the bothy
– mended since the last gales –
the sea eased west
for miles toward the parishes,
hazy now,
the men had left early.
A sea settled for the meanwhile,
Aye, for the meanwhile!
Then, knocking their tea back,
they were out
round the gable end,
checking the sheep fanks, ready.
High on the island,
uninhabited these days, sheep
grazed oblivious,
till the dogs – the keenest
a sly, heavy-dugged bitch –
came slinking behind them.
Then men appeared, and that
backwash voice: will you move
you baa-stards!
Bleating in dismay
the animals zig-zagged down
the vertiginous hill
to spill onto the shore
where they ran, panicked,
and crammed into the fank:
heavy-fleeced mothers
and bewildered lambs,
from whom a truth,
(they now realized)
had been withheld.
'Ewe-lamb', 'tup-lamb',
each animal was seized,
its tail, severed with one snip,
shrugged through the air
to land in a red plastic pail;
each young tup,
upturned, took two men -
doubled over, heads together,
till the lamb's testicles
likewise thumped softly
into the tub, while we joked:
'Oh, will they no' mak a guid soup?'
No – we will deep-fry them,
like they do in Glaa-sgow
with the Maa-rs bars!
Then thrust, one by one
to the next pen, the lambs
huddled in a corner,
and with blood dribbling
down their sturdy
little thighs, they jumped
very lightly, as though in joy.
Summer was passing:
just above the waves,
guillemots whirred toward
their cliff-ledge nests,
but they carried nothing;
few young, this year –
Aye, the birds –
not so many now ...
and the men stood, considering.
Then it was the ewes:
each in turn, a man's thumb
crossways in her mouth
was tilted upside down
like a small sofa, and clipped
till she stepped out trig
and her fleece
cast over the side:
Fit only to be burned! –
No market nowadays –
All the hot Saturday
the men kept to their work
– a modest living –
pausing every so often
to roll cigarettes, or tilt
plastic bottles of cola
to their parched mouths,
as their denims and tee-shirts
turned slowly rigid
with sweat and wool-grease
and the tide began to lift
fronds of dark weed
as though seeking
something mislaid,
and from the cliffs,
through the constant bleating
came the wild birds'
faint, strangulated cries.
When, late in the day
they were done, the sheep,
began to pick their way
up to their familiar pastures –
first the old ewes,
who understood
– if anything – that they,
who take but a small share,
are a living, whom
now and then
a fate visits, like a storm.
But though the sky
was still blue with
teased out clouds,
and the sea brimmed and
lapped at the shore rocks gently,
and they could have rested,
the men wanted away
before the wind rose,
before – they laughed –
the taverns close!
And I run out of tob-aacco!
Before – though they didn't
actually say this – the Sabbath,
so they loaded their boat
– a RIB with a hefty outboard –
and hauled the dogs in.
At first they chugged out
slow and old-fashioned,
like a scene in a documentary,
but suddenly with an arched,
overblown plume
of salt spray
they roared off at top speed,
throwing us a grand wave.
Roses
for M D
This is the moment the roses
cascade over backstreet walls,
throng the public parks –
their cream or scrunched pinks
unfolding now to demonstrate
unacknowledged thought.
The world is ours too! they brave,
careless of tomorrow
and wholly without leadership
for who'd mount a soap-box
on the rose-behalf?
'I haggle for my little
portion of happiness,'
says each flower, equal, in the scented mass.
The Overhaul
Look – it's the Lively,
hauled out above the tideline
up on a trailer with two
flat tyres. What –
14 foot? Clinker-built
and chained by the stern
to a pile of granite blocks,
but with the bow
still pointed westward
down the long voe,
down toward the ocean,
where the business is.
Inland from the shore
a road runs, for the crofts
scattered on the hill
where washing flaps,
and the school bus calls
and once a week or so
the mobile library;
but see how this
duck-egg green keel's
all salt-weathered,
how the stem, taller
– like a film star –
than you'd imagine,
is raked to hold steady
if a swell picks up
and everyone gets scared ...
No, it can't be easy,
when the only spray to touch
your boards all summer
is flowers of scentless mayweed;
when little wavelets leap
less than a stone's throw
with your good name
written all over them –
but hey, Lively,
it's a time-of-life thing,
it's a waiting game –
patience, patience.
Halfling
Bird on the cliff-top,
the angle of your back
a master-stroke:
why should kittiwakes
plunge at your head
with white shrills?
You're only just falling
from your parents' care,
they've dared slope off
together, to quarter
the island's only glen
leaving you sunlit, burnished,
glaring out to sea
like one bewildered.
Some day soon you'll
topple to the winds
and be gone, a gangrel,
obliged to wander
island to mountain,
taking your chances –
till you moult at last
to an adult's mantle
and settle some scant
estate of your own. Already
the gulls shriek Eagle!
Eagle!—they know
more than you
what you'll become.
An Avowal
Bluebell at the wayside
nodding your assent
to summer, and summer's end;
nodding, on your slender stem
your undemurring yes
to the small role life
offers you – a few weeks
seasoning the hill-foot grasses
with shakes of blue ...
You accept, and acquiesce
thereby, to any wind,
though the winds tease:
'Flower,' they ask –
'd'you want to be noticed?'
Yes, yes, noticed!
'Or rather left alone?' Yes,
left perfectly alone! 'Flower,'
they whisper, 'd'you love
the breeze that wantons
the whole earth round
breathing its sweet proposals,
but does not love you?'
– then laugh when your blue
head nods: I do. I do.
The Galilean Moons
for Nat Jansz
Low in the south sky shines
the stern white lamp
of planet Jupiter. A man
on the radio said
it's uncommonly close;
sequestered in the telescope lens
it's like a compere, spotlit,
driving its borrowed light
out to all sides equally.
While set in a row in the dark
beyond its blaze,
like seed-pearls,
or coy new talents
awaiting their call onstage –
are what must be, surely,
the Galilean moons.
In another room,
my children lie asleep, turning
as Earth turns, growing
into their own lives, leaving me
a short time to watch, eye
to the eye-piece,
how a truth unfolds –
how the moonlets glide
out of their chance alignment,
each again to describe
around its shared host
its own unalterable course.
Tell me, Galileo, is this
what we're working for?
The knowing that in just
one Jovian year
the children will be gone
uncommonly far, their bodies
aglow, grown, talented –
mere bright voice-motes
calling from the opposite
side of the world.
What else would we want
our long-sighted instruments
to assure us of? I'd like
to watch for hours, see
what you old astronomers
apprehended for the first time,
bowing to the inevitable ...
but it's late. Already
the next day
plucks at my elbow
like a wakeful infant,
next-door's dog barks,
and a cloud arrives,
appearing out of nothing.
The Bridge
Mind thon bridge? The wynds
that spawned us? Those hemmed in,
ramshackle tenements
taller, it seemed, every year ...
Caller herrin'! Ony rags! On the mountain
stands a lady ...
What a racket! Coal smoke,
midden-reek ... filthy,
needless to mention, our two
old hives, heaped high
either side of the river,
crammed with the living, with the dead-beat
and joined by that sandstone ligature ...
Did you ever notice
how walking out over the water
made us more human:
men became gracious,
women unfolded
their arms from their breasts –
and where else could children,
beggars, any one of us,
pause and look up at the sky!
And that river! Forever
bearing its breeze to the sea,
like a rustic bride, scented
now with blossom,
now with pine sap,
– But what was the sea to us, then?
What was a mountain?
Yes; us. Me and you. That bridge,
long ago demolished
where we first met.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie. Copyright © 2012 Kathleen Jamie. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
The Beach,The Dash,
Five Tay Sonnets,
1. Ospreys,
2. Springs,
3. May,
4. Excavation & Recovery,
5. 'Doing Away',
Fragment 1,
Fragment 2,
The Longhouse,
The Study,
Hawk and Shadow,
The Stags,
Highland Sketch,
A Raised Beach,
Swifts,
The Spider,
The Gather,
Roses,
The Overhaul,
Halfling,
An Avowal,
The Galilean Moons,
The Bridge,
Tae the Fates,
Moon,
The Lighthouse,
Glamourie,
The Roost,
The Wood,
The Whales,
The Widden Burd,
Hauf o' Life,
Even the Raven,
Materials,
Acknowledgements,