Sightlines A conversation with the natural world

Award-winning Scottish poet and essayist Jamie writes of her immersions in nature and history in 14 finely tooled, scrubbed, rinsed, and polished essays. As shrewdly bemused as she is intently observant, as imaginatively interpretive as she is curious, Jamie travels to the Arctic, where she ponders time, vastness, and vulnerability. Jamie excavates her memories of the summer following her graduation from high school, when she worked at an archaeological dig, gleaning experiences that inspire far-reaching musings about our ancestors, art, and burial. She visits a raucous island colony of gannets, where the seabirds seem timeless, though disconcerting bits of plastic are woven into their seaweed nests. Jamie becomes entranced by a magnificent collection of suspended whale skeletons in a Norwegian museum and enchanted by the moon's pewtery, equalizing light. So fully does she give herself over to all that she witnesses, so unexpected are her perceptions, that Jamie's lustrous essays recharge our appreciation not only for the world's beauty and mystery but also for the gift poetic writers such as Jamie possess for translating sensory input into gloriously calibrated, revelatory language.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

This intelligent collection of 14 essays, informed by science and myth, heightened attention, and cultural dreams, is written with Scots brogue, language, and attitude that will give American readers a fresh view of nature. Annoyed by the rosy stories of sea lions and polar bears at a conference of scientists and artists, Scottish poet Jamie (The Overhaul), whose mother had recently died, wonders about the nature of nature: "Where did it reside?... What are vaccinations for, if not to make a formal disconnection from some of these wondrous other species?" Her musings take her to the Arctic to witness the aurora borealis, a pathology lab to view microscopic tumor landscapes, and to ponder time and legend through a lunar eclipse while staring out her own window. But visits to harsh Scottish island landscapes predominate, with the unsolvable mysteries of whales, endangered birds, and lost human cultures serving as recurrent themes. At one point Jamie recognizes a whale she sighted earlier at an island 180 miles and a year away: " 'Believe what you see,' say the eye-trained naturalists. Aye, right. Most of the time you'll sound like an idiot. But once in a blue moon you might be right. You just might be making the same journeys as these other creatures, all of us alive at the same time on the planet." 20 b&w photos. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge, & White. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A Scottish poet's eloquent meditations on nature and on the art of observing the world around her "even when there's nothing much to see." In this probing collection of 14 essays, Jamie (Poetry/Univ. of Stirling; The Overhaul, 2012, etc.) turns her imaginative gaze on the natural phenomena of the many wild places to which she has traveled. She begins with a sea cruise along the fjords of Greenland and a sighting of the aurora borealis. Awed by the spectacle, Jamie writes, "if we could taste the green aurora, it would fizz on the tongue and taste like crme de menthe." Her wandering footsteps led her to remote Scottish islands in the North Atlantic, prehistoric caves in Spain and whaling museums in Norway. With the help of the scientists, surveyors and naturalists with whom she traveled, Jamie honed her sensitivity to the environment even more keenly. She learned to understand the patterns engraved in stone, earth and bone that told stories about the land and sea and the humans who lived and sailed on both. Watching other creatures, from the fragile magpie moth to the majestic killer whale, gave her glimpses into natural laws that often escaped her understanding. Not one to stand apart from what she observes, Jamie examines her own relationship to the landscapes and living things she celebrates. Her life as a writer began when, as a disaffected teenager, she joined an archaeological dig in the Scottish Highlands. Probing the past inspired her to probe beneath the surface of things with words and eventually led her to poetry. Her mother's death many years later led her to scrutinize the human landscape from behind the lens of a hospital microscope. From there, she began to understand the connections that bind the Earth and everything in it and accept her own place in "the rough tribe of the mortal." A lyrical work of profound insight.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.