The winner of numerous literary prizes for previous anthologies, Kathleen Jamie received the prestigious Costa Poetry Award for her most recent collection, The Overhaul.
In conversation with Lydia Fraser of the Scottish Poetry Library, Jamie read a wide selection of these poems, introducing a few of them with the background to the place and experience which inspired them.
As she explained, living in Fife near the River Tay is the starting point of much of her work – nature, the land, the beach, flowers, ospreys, the moon - “how can you live on earth and not want to address the Moon?”.
She reads with a pacey rhythm, each minimalist line coloured by witty metaphors flowing like the melodic harmony in Celtic music. This collection of poetry has been neatly described as “the equivalent of taking a Scottish walk, observing birds, deer, sheep and the sea.”
Painterly images shine through the detailed sights, sound and mood of the natural landscape - such as on the beach, after the storm.
A few brave souls
will be there already,
eyeing the driftwood,
The heaps of frayed
blue polyprop rope,
Cut loose, thrown back at us -
Kathleen Jamie is also an essayist and travel writer, writing both prose and poetry depending on the subject matter. Her new book “Frissure” reflects on the experience of coping with her recent illness and surgery for breast cancer.
The text with images is a collaboration with artist Brigid Collins. It's certainly a personal, intimate story about the healing scars on the body, written as she recuperated in her garden.
She is now looking forward to foreign travels again, this time to Tanzania - after the book festival reading she was off to buy flip flops and summer clothes.
The experience of the trip in October will surely feature in her next book of poetry, the memories of heat and dust of Africa very different from the banks of the Tay.
The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie (Picador Poetry)
Frissure by Kathleen Jamie & Brigid Collins (Birlinn)