Kathleen Jamie is the author of several poetry collections, including The Queen of Sheba, The Tree House, The Overhaul and The Keelie Hawk, and three essay collections, Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing. She became the Scots Makar in 2021.
just to see how you’refaring up therewith little companyjust the odd bat or harethat careers around‘turning the world’so you tell me. I gatheryou snap your fingersin the face of the east windfeel the moon groan as shelearns the ropes againtangled among branchesthat you bend, so you say,to shake her free. You tell megood will prevail, allshall be well etcetera,the same old...
The stone suits the poetry. Or perhaps it’s the other way round. I think poetry suits stone, more than it suits paper, certainly more than it suits a screen.
Iclimbed a low cliff and stationed myself on a bench that overlooked the Firth of Forth. From Kinghorn, the Fife coast and the coast of East Lothian appear to peel away from each other; on the horizon lies the North Sea. There are several islands out in the firth and, as usual, a number of ships were riding at anchor. The ships were connected to the oil industry: the Grangemouth refinery is...
Once upon a hill there grew a tree. Because it had been so long honed by the wind,it appeared, like an apostle in a painting, to gesture beyond itself toward some greater glory,in this case the landscape far below.
You could lean against the tree and watch the river become a firth, widening over milesas it prepared to meet the sea. You could watch as it bore away not just the winter’s...
When Chowang Sherpa joined us at Kathmandu airport for the flight to Lukla, he was carrying a flat-screen TV set, still in its box. The TV was on its way to Everest Base Camp. ‘Why?’ we asked.
‘They demand,’ he said simply, meaning his clients. Chowang is the owner of Arun Treks, an expedition and trekking outfitter based in Kathmandu. The short spring climbing...
The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S....
Poetry anthologies are now expected to make holy war; but what to do with The New Poetry, which strives so earnestly to turn its trumpet-majors into angels? The 55 poets collected here are, it...
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