“[Kathleen Jamie’s] essays guide you softly along coastlines of varying continents, exploring caves, and pondering ice ages until the narrator stumbles over — not a rock on the trail, but mortality, maybe the earth’s, maybe our own, pointing to new paths forward through the forest.” —Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, “By the Book” in The New York Times Book Review. An immersive exploration of time and place in a shrinking world, from the award-winning author of Sightlines. In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressiely preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.

Surfacing

History

Jamie, Kathleen

Americas

Penguin Publishing Group

This collection of poetry is on varying subjects, from rowing to a series of baby poems called Ultrasound, which is part of a longer work commissioned by BBC Radio 4.

Jizzen

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Picador

The Bonniest Companie

In her extraordinary new collection, Kathleen Jamie examines her native Scotland—a country at once wild and contained, rural and urban—and her place within it. In the author's own words : "2014 was a year of tremendous energy in my native Scotland, and knowing I wanted to embrace that energy and participate in my own way, I resolved to write a poem a week, and follow the cycle of the year." The poems also venture into childhood and family memory—and look to ahead to the future. The Bonniest Companie is visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.

In her extraordinary new collection, Kathleen Jamie examines her native Scotland—a country at once wild and contained, rural and urban—and her place within it. In the author's own words : "2014 was a year of tremendous energy in my native Scotland, and knowing I wanted to embrace that energy and participate in my own way, I resolved to write a poem a week, and follow the cycle of the year." The poems also venture into childhood and family memory—and look to ahead to the future. The Bonniest Companie is visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.

Kathleen Jamie's Selected Poems gathers together some of the finest work by one of the foremost poets currently writing in English. Although Jamie is perhaps best known for her writing on nature, landscape, and place, Selected Poems shows the full and remarkably diverse range of her work - and why many regard her work as crucially relevant to our troubled age. No poet currently writing has a keener eye or ear; no poet has paid more careful attention to the other consciousnesses with whom we share the planet - and no poet has Jamie's almost miraculous ability to show us just how the world might look when the human eye ceases to gaze on it. This exceptional collection of poetry, spanning several decades, allows readers to chart the development of one of our most important contemporary talents, and serves as perfect introduction to her work.

Selected Poems

A sensational collection of bilingual poems from the National Poet of Scotland. The Keelie Hawk is a landmark collection from Kathleen Jamie, the current Makar (National Poet) of Scotland. For the first time, Kathleen Jamie has brought her astonishing lyric talent to the language of her homeland, with outstanding results. This deeply resonant collection is written in Scots, with each poem accompanied by a translation into English. Its publication is a significant event in Scottish literature, not only a reclaiming by one of our finest poets of the mouth-music of literary Scots, but a furthering of that language: "by making poems, a language develops," Jamie observes in a fascinating afterword.

The Keelie Hawk: Poems in Scots

Picador UK

"A book of unparalleled beauty, sharpness of observation, wit, delicacy, strength of vision and rare exactness of language." ―The Daily Telegraph
I had noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs, and the shoaling light, and the way the doctor listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt, and the speckled bird and the sickle-cell man's slim feet. Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?
During her husband's hospital stay for a life-threatening illness, Kathleen Jamie didn't pray, but she did find herself paying very close attention to the world around her. In Findings, she shares her direct, uncluttered observations of the natural and unnatural world―seen from her kitchen window, on the streets of Edinburgh, in hospital corridors, in the Outer Hebrides.
What she finds: an awe-inspiring salmon run that turns out to have been reengineered so that no salmon can possibly reach the top of the falls. A disembodied doll head, caught with the carcass of a whale on a remote island, where crofters once combed for driftwood. She wonders "if durability is still a virtue, when we have invented plastic."
Findings received resounding praise on publication in the United Kingdom. John Berger named it his favorite book of 2005, "because it finds without disturbing the found. And this takes courage and delicacy" (The Guardian).

Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

Graywolf Press

The first U.S. publication of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, author of The Tree House, winner of the 2004 Forward Prize for best poetry collection
It isn't mine to give. I can't coax this bird to my hand that knows the depth of the river yet sings of it on land. ―from "The Dipper"
For more than twenty years, Kathleen Jamie has been writing the poetry that has established her as "the leading Scottish poet of her generation" (The Sunday Times). Lyrical and meditative, her poems engage the natural world and human society with an authentic, earthly spirituality.
Waterlight at last makes Jamie's work available to American readers. Her poetry―rendered sometimes in the Scots dialect, sometimes in the descriptive bursts of a naturalist's field guide ―confronts gender, sex, landscape, and nationhood with the vivacity of an essential poetic voice.

Waterlight: Selected Poems

Winner of the 2012 Costa Poetry Award, the latest collection by Kathleen Jamie, "the leading Scottish poet of her generation" (The Sunday Times) 
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.

The Overhaul: Poems

As a woman traveling alone in the early 1990s, Kathleen Jamie had exceptional access to the people inhabiting the remote Northern Areas of Pakistan: She befriended not only the men, but the purdah-observing Shia Muslim women who rarely appear in public. In the isolated mountain villages, she met locals balancing their traditions with the inevitable encroachment of tourism. When Jamie returned to the area after September 11, 2001, she was the only foreigner in the area. In an extensive epilogue, she observes how her friends and the area have changed as a result of war, tourism, and the passage of time. This intimate narrative reveals how Western women’s freedoms are perceived. One explains: Your lifestyle is very strange and very difficult to us.” Meanwhile, Jamie is surprised to discover that they have never been to the public bazaar that she wanders through so casually. As Jamie discusses arranged marriage, divorce, children, education, travel, and attitudes toward freedom and risk with them, she draws a compelling and lively portrait of their lives and offers important insights for Americans seeking to better understand this remote part of the world. Among Muslims has been shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Award. Illuminated throughout with a vision that sees beneath surfaces.”Norman Lewis ... a wonderfully sensual study of the land and its people which feels more timeless than topical.”The Observer (London) The publication of [Among Muslims], with its plea for understanding and tolerance, couldn't have been better timed.”The London Times (London)

Among Muslims: Everyday Life on the Frontiers of Pakistan

Middle East

Seal Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jamie, Kathleen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jamie, Kathleen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jamie, Kathleen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Surfacing

Jizzen

The Bonniest Companie

The Bonniest Companie

Selected Poems

The Keelie Hawk: Poems in Scots

Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World

Waterlight: Selected Poems

The Overhaul: Poems

Among Muslims: Everyday Life on the Frontiers of Pakistan