In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her Work ed. by Rachel Falconer
  • Fiona Wilson
Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her Work. Edited by Rachel Falconer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. ISBN 9780748696000. 216pp. hbk. £70.

Kathleen Jamie is among the most distinguished of Scottish writers and her career has now spanned some three decades, winning her awards and accolades in Scotland, the United Kingdom, and across the world. This new collection of essays and poems, appealingly edited by Rachel Falconer, offers the first thorough critical accounting of Jamie’s work as a whole. On these grounds alone, Falconer has performed an important service, but this beautifully put together volume does so much more, assembling critics and poets in a substantial exchange about Jamie’s art.

The sixteen essays here focus on central aspects of Jamie’s career: her use of Scots and Standard English; her consistent interest in what it means to write about nature; her fidelity to an ethics of listening; and her explorations of nationhood, identity, and the experience of living in a female body. Alan Riach and Robert Crawford both trace the evolving use of Scots in Jamie’s work; for Riach, this trajectory maps an increasingly assured engagement with nationhood; Crawford tracks a similar development, with some insightful comments too on the politics of writing in Scots, as well as Jamie’s engagement with the ballad tradition and the translation of European poetry into Scots. ‘I think the job is to listen, to pay attention’, Jamie has written, and Faith Lawrence and Peter Mackay expand on the ethical implications of this exacting stance (Lawrence, like Lyn Davidson, offers her own unobtrusive critical tribute to this ethics with some fine close reading).

Several essays consider the poet’s conversations with writers and artists of all sorts, on the page as in person. Eleanor Spencer discusses Jamie’s collaborative projects with the poet Andrew Grieg (A Flame in Your Heart, 1986), photographer Sean Mayne Smith (The Autonomous Region, 1993) and artist Brigid Collins (Frissure, 2013). Eleanor Bell reads Jamie’s prose collections Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) within the context of ‘an earlier generation of Scottish Renaissance writing about nature’, specifically Nan Shepherd’s iconic work The Living Mountain (1977). Juliet Simpson and Timothy C. Baker, writing separately on gender, place, and national identity, discuss Jamie in relation to Seamus Heaney; David Wheatley, in a lyrical personal essay, maps her against Yeats, among others. In another closely attentive reading, Michael O’Neill considers formal affinities between Jamie [End Page 184] and such major peaks of the Romantic range as Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. Contrasts and comparisons with MacDiarmid are frequent. The volume closes with a fascinating, nuanced comparison, by Maria Johnston, between Jamie and Irish poet Michael Longley. What is refreshingly underlined here, and throughout the book, is the value of creative dialogue between critics, poets, and poet-critics. It is not so much as a levelling of the academic playing field, as an insistence that, if the playing field is really to be a playing field, poets and critics might as well play together (more than a few of the contributors are already on the same team). It is in this spirit that the six original poems included here – by Longley, Jamie McKendrick, Michael O’Neill, Leontia Flynn, Fiona Sampson, and Andrew Greig – do not merely decorate the book; rather, they extend and redefine the critical arguments explored within it.

Holistic literary criticism of this sort is a feature of contemporary ecopoetics, as championed in particular by Jonathan Bate, and can be sourced to a certain element of European Romanticism. A central cluster of essays address Jamie as an ecopoet, writing, as Peter Mackay nicely puts it, ‘towards nature’. While a critical attitude to Romantic ideology predominates in most of these pieces, the grounds of their discussion frequently presuppose familiar Romantic concepts. In this light, Amanda Bell casts Jamie’s nature poetry as pushing standard dualisms to the point of stress in ‘a struggle for voice and identity’; Mackay sees a poet engaged in ‘a dynamic dialect between resistance to, and immersion in the natural world’; and Louisa Gairm finds in Jamie...

pdf

Share