Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Cairn’

The old Athenian playwrights were expected to follow their three tragedies for the festival of Dionysus with a lighter ‘satyr’ play.  The idea, it seems, was to take the edge off the horrors and traumas of the earlier dramas.  Kathleen Jamie, after publishing a trilogy of collections of lengthy essays on the large themes that preoccupy her – the fragility of the natural world, travel in remote places, and the continuities of deep time – has now produced Cairn,an apparently lighter book of much smaller pieces.  Except that it isn’t, and they aren’t (except in word length).

There’s a new tone, sombre and urgent, in Cairn.  Almost all the pieces are very short, often just a page in length.  Jaimie calls them ‘micro-essays’.  In form, most are in prose, with a few poems, but really all of them are poems.  She picks every word with care, and weights them precisely against their neighbours.  You could easily read the book (136 pages, including illustrations) in an hour.  But don’t.

A cairn is a small heap of stones, a landmark for travellers on foot.  Jaimie accumulated her ‘distillations and observations’ over several years, and assembled them into a small mound.  Cairns are often arranged in a chain to show the course of a path, and her pieces often call across to one another, with mini-sequences of successive pieces.

Jaimie sets the scene in a prologue: a walk out of an unnamed town (clearly Stromness) into wild, elemental nature.  She recalls an early ‘not very good’ poem about the same place, and being ‘seduced by the Sublime’.  Then, it was possible to imagine that humans couldn’t seriously harm the planet.  Now we know better.  There’s another change: Jamie has turned sixty, and feels a new sense of personal mortality.  She looks back at some distance to her childhood and youth, and forward to a new phase of life, ‘whatever happens next’.

The standpoint of age sharpens memories of childhood.  ‘The book’ recalls her young self’s innocent error: asked by a teacher to fetch Days in the sun from another classroom, she runs off and ask for Daisies in the sun.  The 60-year-old, asks, ‘Is she still in there, that infant, skipping down the corridor with a future in her hand?’  The next piece is ‘June’, a moment from clearing of the parental attic with her siblings.  They rediscover ‘June’, a Doulton figurine, and end up ‘greetin’ for everything we’d known as bairns’. 

(Cairn is sprinkled with examples of Scots vernacular, like ‘jawbox’, ‘airt’, ‘oan a shoogly peg’, all of which reinforce the strong local settlings of most of the pieces.)

Innocence-at-a-distance features again in ‘The storm’, another primary school memory, when multiplication tables are interrupted by a sudden storm.  But it’s just a ‘spot of wild weather’, not the sign of a planet out of kilter.  The pupils return to ‘our certainties, our blackboard and story-books’.  ‘Four tens are forty!  Envy us, infants in an undisfeatured world’.  ‘Hillside spring’, too, contrasts a childhood recollection with the reality of the parched present.  Searching for the source of her local reservoir, Jaimie finds only a ‘muddy ooze’ among fields ‘beginning to crack’.  All is silence, devoid of birds and insects.  She brushes accidentally against nettles

… and suddenly a crowd of white butterflies was fluttering around me like a shredded contract, so many that for one moment I felt a leap of joy, like a five years bairn again, blythly venturing towards the end of the known, but with no-one left alive to call me home.  

Intimations of mortality are everywhere.  In ‘Fullness of time’ (‘a favourite phrase of yours’) parental ashes are scattered.  In ‘Oculus’, like a neolithic tomb-builder Jaimie builds a cardboard circle through which the low winter sun casts suggestive shadows on the wall; one of them looks like the bus of a close friend, ‘Callum, he of the wry smile, who died so suddenly this time last year’.  In a winter meditation on jackdaws, ‘corvid’ slips into ‘Covid’.  Unable to visit her infected daughter, Jaimie sends her a cross-stich kit, so that she can sit in the window light and embroider.  ‘Window’ slips into ‘widow’, the one who’s doing the embroidering:

Midwinter sunset:
Jackdaws gather at the roost
Night stiches her ebony wings.

As the book develops, the personal ‘greetin’’ extends to embrace the whole of the natural world, baked hard and de-specied by human activity.  An Atlantic island, with ‘no birds, save for a crashed corpse or two’; the Bass Rock gannets, decimated by avian flu; the skull of a whaup, ‘the ‘common’ curlew, as the old books have it’, moving towards extinction; the skeleton of a whale in the museum at Plasthvalen, Bergen, displayed alongside a glass cylinder filled with the plastic bags that throttled it to death.

But still, it’s important to feel hope and not to despair.  A constant awareness of the deep past helps build confidence in the future.  An archaeologist, the inheritor of ancient skills, knows, and shows, how to strike flint tools from a core.  ‘The mirror’, a piece of dazzling transitions in thought, leads us to a Pictish symbol stone and the idea that fauna and flora have changed throughout history, not only recently.  The longest piece in the book, ‘The handover’, concerns preparations for a climate demo in Glasgow.  It recalls to Jaimie memories of her much earlier protests, including Greenham Common (which few among the younger marchers have heard of).  Later, her son, reflecting on the day, says he’s determined to face whatever the uncertain future may bring: ‘He said, ‘I’m going to live through it’, and it clenched my heart.  I thought: Please do.  Please please do.’

It may seem that ‘if we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive.’ Yet Cairn is powerful evidence that poetry can survive.  Swifts may be disappearing from our skies, but they still evoke wonder, and words of wonder, ‘still high, stealing the last drops of day’ (‘Swifts’).

Cairn is a book to return to again and again.  It helps that physically it’s also a thing of beauty.  The cover itself is a triumph, with an image that reflects perfectly the structure of the contents.  The font, Goudy Old Style, is very readable, but also helps the eye linger on the words, and the pencil drawings by Miek Zwamborn, a Dutchwoman who lives on Mull, echo the texts, quietly and unobtrusively.

Kathleen Jaimie, Cairn, London: Sort Of Books, 2024.