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.
Until we’re restored to ourselves by weaning, the skin jade only where it’s hidden under jewellery, areolae still tinged, – there’s a word for women like us.
It’s suggestive of the lush ditch, or even an ordeal, – as though we’d risen, tied to a ducking-stool, gasping, weed-smeared, proven.
The Black and White Minstrel ShowOut there...
Piled in the corner of a second-hand store in Toronto: of course it’s an immigrant country. Sometimes
all you can take is what you can carry when you run: a photo, some clothes, and the useless dead-weight
of your mother-tongue. One was repaired with electrician’s tape – a trade
was all a man needed. A girl, well, a girl could get married. Indeed each case opened...
So I’m moving between rooms with a tray, advertising McEwan’s, the kind we took sledging those distant snow-bright afternoons
– or funereal lacquer, with peonies, or that classic of my mother’s: a view of Windsor Castle inside a wicker pale. Whatever
– a tray, and on it: two glasses of Vouvray, or better: croissants and cafetière, my lover outstretched on...
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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