Cairn: ‘A marvel of a book’ Observer

Cairn: a marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers

As she reached her 60th year, the acclaimed author and poet Kathleen Jamie turned to a new form of writing: personal notes, prose poems, micro-essays, fragments. In her new book they are arranged together like the stones of a wayside cairn, marking changes to an inner and outer landscape.

The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie’s intent noticing of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood, and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care, she marks the point she has reached in life and within the cascading crises of our times.

Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie’s calibre could achieve.

345

Kathleen Jamie

Cairn

with drawings by

Miek Zwamborn

6

7

Contents

About the Book

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

Gapsite

The Night Wind

The Book

‘June’

Private and Confidential

Hillside Spring

Wind-Driven Clouds

The Yellow Door

Swifts

Hawkbit

Shipping Forecast

The Storm

The Phone Wires

Corvid

Glen Esk

Fullness of Time

Moor

The Whaup’s Skull

Quartz Pebble8

The Forth Whales

Summer

Mechanical, Predictable

The Midwinter Whale

Plasthvalen

Glen

Oculus

Lost Geese

Jordan Street

The Handover

The Summit

Peregrines

Panayia Porphyra

Memorial9

Once Upon a Hill

The Bass Rock

A Flint Core

A Sunlit Weir

Erratic

The Mirror

Lone Tree

Webs

Cairn

Epilogue

Thanks

About the Author

Also by Kathleen Jamie Published by Sort Of Books

Copyright10

11‘Stones propose another sense of time, whereby the past, the deep past of the planet, proffers a meagre yet massive support to acts of human resistance …’

John Berger12

13

Prologue

A long time ago, thirty years, I spent some weeks in the northern isles. It was the depth of winter and one night a gale blew up. Nothing unusual in that.

Being more given then to romantic impulses, I left the house that formed part of a nineteenth-century square in the centre of town, and followed the narrow street southward. The street had several kinks or bends, which, by accident or design, baffled the wind. No-one else was out. Very soon, I’d passed the last house and the final streetlamp, which was trembling. Beyond its pool of light I paused to let my eyes adjust, then leaned against the wind and carried on.

The street had become a lane bound on one side by a stone wall which sheltered a few bushes. By now, however, I was nearing the sea and the wind was reaching screaming point. It was such a pitch I grew frightened; surely that wasn’t wind I was hearing, but somehow, incredibly, the 14engines of a jet plane! Had a plane somehow landed on the land beyond the wall? Some military exercise?

A disused fishermen’s shed stood by the end of the lane. When I reached it, then stepped beyond its shelter, the wind knocked me off balance so I retreated into its lee. From there I could watch the waves surging through the channel, light glinting on their crests, and the various islands beyond. Above were the scudding clouds, sometimes a star, and always the noise. Well, it was what I’d come out for: the night, the storm winds and the sea.

And the lighthouses. Over on the far side of the channel stood the Low light and the High, erected in Victorian times to guide ships into Scapa Flow. There they were, sending their steady signals out into the night, the taller casting a path across the sea, now there now gone. A few house lights shone in the distance. Beyond the lighthouses, from the island of Flotta came a high constant flame: the oil terminal’s flare stack burning off excess gas.

As I say, that was three decades ago. Half my lifespan to date. I was writing poems then, or trying to. Soon after, there was a man and he joined me, we found a run-down house we could afford to buy, and he, a skilled craftsman, began work on it. Within five years we had two children, because that’s how life can turn when you’re a woman of 30. Life went on. I wrote my poems and published them, and then some books, and was offered a teaching 15post. The children grew into adulthood. In due course, my