Kathleen Jamie, The Overhaul (Picador)
I started at the beginning which I don't always do with books of poems. In this case it was a good idea because it became apparent more readily than it otherwise might have done that the poems take us through a year like an almanac.
Kathleen Jamie is possibly better at doing wintry chill than midsummer. We begin with wind on the coast, which is the environment of many of the poems, in January and move through further shoreline or rural settings, populated more by wildlife or weather than by people. And we are well aware that it is a Scottish coast for the use of Scots words as well as whole poems in dialect if we hadn't guessed already from the climate. And there a few words here that will come in useful at Scrabble if they are admissable south of the border.
It is not quite what I was expecting from Jamie as my inadequate knowledge of her work heretofore had led me to think of her as more directly political and with more 'attitude' but the blurb suggests these poems 'broaden her poetic range considerably' and so perhaps it doesn't continue her themes thus far because it is a 'midlife book of repair, restitution'. Either way, it is an excellent book, immediately and clearly accessible and sure to enhance her reputation whatever it has been based on up to now.
As well as the wind, pebbled beaches and wildlife, in which summer is recorded through flowers and birds, two poems in which the moon encroaches into her room are among the most memorable.,
the books, too, appeared inclined
to open and confess.
and the world of the poems is extended by a view through a telescope of Jupiter's moons.
Hawk and Shadow is in a similar form to Thom Gunn's Tamer and Hawk and so can't help but suggest to me an intertextual relation. It is either consciously that or one of those examples of great minds thinking alike.
Being out of sorts
with my so-called soul,
part unhooked hawk,
part shadow on parole,
I played fast and loose.
And what we are usually left with is an idea of a shifting, temporary world that is at the same time rooted in those processes and so we might find them uneasy or displaced at times but the overall impression is of survival and, certainly as poetry, great satisfaction.
The best poem for me is the last one, Materials, where we are left with a superb description of gannets that 'pluck such rubbish from the waves' to make a network of nests on the cliffs, 'colonies so raucous and thief-ridden', and then they leave the cliffs,
wearing naught but a shoddy, bird-knitted vest.
(the cliffs, not the birds)
and the episode refers Jamie back to ourselves,
...but a bit of bruck's
all we need to get us started, all we leave behind us when we're gone.
It is a sure-footed, admirable and entirely convincing book that I only regret not having read in time to include on my shortlist for last year's best. It would have prevented the walkover by Julia Copus and at least given us a race.
