Findings By Kathleen Jamie
I'm not sure how to describe Jamie's essays, other than by superlative adjectives. She is usually noted as a nature writer, and many of the essays in this book do focus on nature, but not always. Each piece is contemplative, thoughtful, often profound musings; I hesitated at the use of that word as it suggests aimless thoughts but I think it apt. These are not narrative works in the strict sense: she does not describe and event or a journey so much as focus on certain aspects, and you realise she has circled and reiterated and extracted particulars to draw focus on some aspect of her life, and of the universal.
This is not a book to be rushed. Each essay needs to be savoured for its beauty, with a pause between to allow it to percolate into the brain and the soul. Findings Finding this book - in a charity shop, with a long train journey ahead - was a piece of serendipity.
It's hard to know quite why this series of essays and reflections is so enjoyable. The poet Kathleen Jamie describes her explorations of the natural world. Some pieces focus on the area round her home, others on her travels around remoter areas of Scotland. There are a couple of sections devoted to her discoveries of little-known parts of Edinburgh.
Maybe it's the unflashy beauty of her measured prose, its mixture of calmness and curiosity. Kathleen Jamie enabled me to see and she made me think. Her writing has a meditative quality, but it's honest - there's no false straining towards spirituality. She is unsentimental about Nature too, always acknowledging the way that human beings have put their mark on even the most 'unspoiled' landscape. Or own emotions - and situation - will always influence what we observe.
Each piece had the clarity - and mystery - of a successful poem. Findings not very appealing to me, literally only read it because it's on my final tomorrow Findings Five stars, more if I could. A book of essays about the flora and fauna of the author's native Scotland, a bit about her family and life in general. Her curiosity and insatiable love of nature evident as is her skill as a writer and a poet. I'll never get to Scotland myself, that's for sure but this little volume of essays provided me with the best armchair traveling I've done in a while. Findings I read a little of this book of nature essays ten years ago, not long after it was released (and highly praised). I was underwhelmed. Yet the same characteristics I wasn't keen on then are what I enjoyed now.
In the intervening decade, a strand of mystically, historically inclined nature writing has become popular. My theory (as I've mentioned already to some friends) is that many of these authors, in their thirties and forties, fellow late Gen-X'ers, grew up on series I also loved, for example, The Dark Is Rising and Robin of Sherwood and as a result something a bit pagan is entwined with the way we appreciate nature. It used to feel like it was mostly in my head, there were only a handful of people I'd ever spoken to who 'got' it; then a few authors started writing that way; and the next thing you know, you can't browse books without falling over and bruising yourself on atavistic verbal celebrations of the countryside. Findings is like wholemeal bread - all the easier to appreciate when indulgences have become so frequent as to get boring, but it would be a grey world if that was all one experienced.
Findings is rooted in its present; ferries and oil rigs and plastic rubbish on the seashore are as much part of the vista as the older landscapes. (It never felt aesthetically wrong to read this as an ebook, as it might with some texts.) The author visits Maes Howe, and there are surveyors inside with technical equipment; she also can't stay for the solstice as she has to be home to look after the kids that day. This is an experience of nature frequently bound by practicalities; there are no months'-long escapist trips (or the impression of them) to far flung wildernesses, or experiences of landscape that feel as if one could easily stumble back in time hundreds or thousands of years.
Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that's how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in the traffic: oyster-catchers; in the school-playground, sparrows. And the natural world is a solace, to some extent in the background, when her husband is seriously ill for a couple of weeks, and when she has to talk to her grandmother about going into a home.
As I started this book again, I recalled something - which my Scottish friends may take issue with. A cumulative personal feeling and experience, picked up from people in different places is that this kind of nature mysticism, and a certain associated fanciful extravagance is rather English, there being far more sympathy for it in the southern half of England in particular. Whilst the average Scot, albeit not necessarily Calvinist in the religious sense about such things, would typically find them silly, superfluous and perhaps a little suspicious if actually articulated (cf. the writing of Robert MacFarlane* compared with this book, an Englishmanedespite the name). The best response you'd get would be that person's version of 'that's nice dear', they wouldn't take the conversational ball and run with it. Kathleen Jamie's Scotland feels Nordic and sensible; the obverse of that is, perhaps inevitably, a touch of Jante Law. Then there's the quality of Belle & Sebastian and other Scottish indie commonly called 'fey': if you must be weird and artsy, you should be a bit shy and apologetic about it - not flamboyant (unless of course you're drunk).
I didn't expect Jamie, later in the book, to write a scene illustrating the contrast I perceive.
Nonetheless, I feel robbed – denied one of the sounds of summer, which all our forebears would have known, that irksome little crex-crex. Why conserve them, other than it being our moral duty to another life form on this earth? If there is no ‘clam’rin craik’, no ‘noisy one of the rushes’, it betokens something out of kilter with the larger ecosystem on which ultimately, in mysterious as-yet-undiscovered ways, we all depend.
That’s what the ecologists and scientists will tell you. But there are things which cannot be said – not by scientists, anyway. Another person arrives at the viewing bench, not an old lady but a man in young middle age, a holiday-maker. We fall into conversation – he obviously knows his stuff about birds. He has a young family with him on the island and, while they’re on the beach, he has slunk off for an hour in the hope of spotting a corncrake. So here he is, an Englishman of higher education with a professional job, a family, a cagoule and good binoculars.
‘Can I ask why you like them? Corncrakes I mean.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘They’re like… little gods of the field, aren’t they?’
I could have punched the air. If corncrakes are rare, animism is rarer still. Anyone can clear his throat and talk about biodiversity, but ‘Corncrakes… little gods of the field’ will not get you published in ornithologists’ journals. That’s how I picture them now, however: standing chins up, open-beaked, like votive statues hidden in the grass.
I get the feeling she would never have allowed herself to imagine it of her own accord.
On a couple of other occasions she reprimands herself for some poetic ideas - but she's a poet. (e.g. In a museum of dead things: In this place of silence and slow time, it’s as though [they] hug each other and look happily forever up - on the bright linnets and wrens. Which, I remind myself through tears, is ridiculous. ) If even a poet isn't supposed to imagine such things, who on earth is, in her stringently realist world-view?
Most of the essays are about rural lansdcapes, but two are about Edinburgh. One is about rooftop features of notable buildings in the city, the other a visit to a museum collection of 18th and 19th century medical specimens: organs, bodies and the like. The latter is something I'd never have chosen to read about, but I'm not so soft I'd need to leave a gap in the book. I wasn't squeamish about the description of a dead beached whale on an uninhabited island in an earlier essay. It's not the purely physical I mind, but the introduction of human authoritarian behaviour into the equation alongside the physically repulsive must be what leads me to I find the account of these specimens nauseating and angering. I very much liked the way Jamie tried to balance her instinctive felt suspicion of the character of the old specimen and body collectors with attempts to understand the different mores of the time and the stage science was at. (Professional writers are so much better at that sort of thing than the average GR reviewer...) Although given that empathy is now said to be considered far more important in medical training - and a strong stomach for witnessing physical ills doesn't necessarily preclude caring about individuals' experiences - I must disagree with her final point in that piece in which she agrees with a C19th quote about doctors' acquired lack of pity being useful for humanity as a whole.
The downside of Jamie's love of the quotidian is that the writing could be more spectacular too; its attention to detail is excellent but it can lack the intensity some would expect from a poet. However, Findings would be ideal for those who find Macfarlane's books overly literary, elitist, and dreamy - or who feel that one can sometimes have too much of a good thing as far as romantic nature writing is concerned.
* My own conclusion, but whilst writing this I found an LRB review - there's a quote from the paywalled text in this blog post - indicating that at one point Jamie also considered herself a different sort of writer from MacFarlane. Findings
Reading poetry , i suppose, is a little like entering into a relationship with someone much more than in a novel or history or even, oddly in a biography or autobiography. In those prose works you encounter, to an extent, from a distance but in Poetry you encounter the person their opinions and feelings and sometimes even their innermost thoughts that maybe they are not even too sure or certain about. I know that when i write my own paltry stuff because i find I often reveal far more that I realized or certainly far more than I intended.
Anytime I take down a volume of poetry I know that I am likely to encounter some poems which move me unutterably and others which leave me cold. Now again, using the image of a relationship, I realize that this, normally, is far more about me and not the writer, it is something about my state of mind at that time or my mood or my levels of concentration and that is why poetry in my experience, needs dipping into over extnded periods of time rather than one hefty digesting. Kathleen Jamie's work, though prose, reads like a poem and is a series of short essays or meditations on her journeying around her world. Some are wonderfully evocative of her love of the natural world and her intimate encounters with things that set her heart on fire and I captured a sense of this love, this deep appreciation of the world around her but, as with any poetic musing, one or two fell dismally flat for me. That is my point however, maybe I needed to approach this book more like poetry than prose. The two essays 'Surgeon's hall' and 'Skylines' were very disappointing but maybe that was because i had been so impressed and moved by the others. perhaps if i read them in a few weeks or months they will wow me in the same way as others of the collection did.
She is a poet and she cannot write without imagery and analogies, the pages are littered with them; On the very first page she has a beautifully atmospheric image
'It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close'
and almost every other page bestows a little dewdrop to glisten and sparkle on the narrative's surface.
Descriptions of weather and wind and cloud are everywhere. 'smir of cloud' (i assumed this was a scottish word for 'smear' but am open to be corrected), 'scraps of rainbow', 'squalls like grey wings', 'the evening sky, winnowed by the wind, was whitish blue'.
She also has a great turn of phrase, using humour in her images.
'Like three elegant women conversing at a cocktail party are the Standing Stones of Stenness',
Blossoms issuing out on to the trees are 'like a dancehall filling on a Saturday night',
'We must have looked less like monks than cheapskate Magi, the three of us in waterproofs, one behind the other, bearing these peculiar things',
'the kind of bird who'd want to be excused games'....I loved this bizarre anthropomorphism,
'the snow melt draining down from the higher hills dither and slouch and form sullen pools, like teenagers at a bus stop',
'birds cruising over the rooftops like pieces flaked off from the city's skin'
and then every now and again a beautiful piece of thinking which leaves you wondering and revolving in thought;
'the cobwebs made me think of ears, or those satellite dishes attuned to every different nuance of the distant universe'
A really lovely book nad one I will definitely look through again and hope that when i encounter those two other chapters next time I am more ready for them, more, to finish back where I started, up for it. Findings In just over 2 weeks, my wife and I will leave home to head, for the sixth time in as many years for a holiday on an island off the west cost of Scotland. We’ve been to Islay, Skye, Arran and Mull (twice) and this time we will take our courage in both hands and go further still into the Outer Hebrides.
Reading Findings has definitely heightened my excitement about this upcoming holiday. Much of the book is set in the Inner and Outer Hebrides and I suppose this might partly explain why I enjoyed reading the book so much.
It is also a book that spoke to me about the way I approach my life. I spend a lot of time outside searching for wildlife that I can photograph. It was great to read...
“This is what I want to learn: to notice, but not to analyse. To still the part of the brain that’s yammering, ‘My God, what’s that? A stork, a crane, an ibis? - don’t be silly, it’s just a weird heron.’ Sometimes we have to hush the frantic inner voice that says ‘Don’t be stupid,’ and learn again to look, to listen.
Much of the book is an encouragement to notice things in the midst of normal life:
“Then the osprey was gone and I turned back to the dryer, looking for matching socks”.
There are chapters about birds, a chapter about salmon, a chapter about the illness of the author’s husband, a chapter about cetaceans. And more. In all of them, the author infuses a sense of wonder with a sense of the “normalness” of life.
As a bird watcher, I perhaps especially loved the chapters about birds. Last year on Mull, we took a day trip to Iona where we stood by a field for 2 hours because we could hear 2 corncrakes calling and we wanted to see them. Seeing these birds is notoriously difficult and we had to give up when it was time to leave to catch the ferry back to Mull. So when I read this, about a woman who also wanted to see a corncrake...
”Birdwatchers come especially - Sarah tells of an old lady who sat quiet and demure on this very viewing bench for an hour, two hours...then there was a whoop, and Sarah turned to see the old lady leaping around, punching the air like a footballer, just for a glimpse of an elusive brown bird.”
...I was there, I could relate!
There is a chapter about a museum collection of body parts. As I read this, I could not help being reminded of both Flights and Sight. Perhaps this quotation will explain why to those who have also read these books:
”Several times, in his writings, he approached anatomy through metaphor striving for exactitude. ‘The opened body is as a foreign country,’ he wrote, ‘Anatomy is as a harvest field’; ‘Anatomy is as to medicine as sight is to the body.’”
A collection of meditations that manages to link history to our modern world and that manages to encourage us to look for the beauty and the detail around us.
A beautiful book.
Findings One of my favourite nature writers, her poetry and her essays are very comforting to settle into and her subtle connections between the world of humans and nature, often as elusive as a random bird or moth sighting itself.
Read my full review here at Word by Word. Findings I have been looking forward to reading this book since I read its equally brilliant sequel/companion piece Sightlines last year. Jamie brings a quiet poetic eye to her observations of both the natural world and modern humanity, making many intriguing connections.
She succeeds in making a beautiful and unified whole from essays on a very varied set of subjects, ranging from the nature of darkness, birdwatching, remote uninhabited Scottish islands, the view from Edinburgh's Calton Hill and a museum of surgical specimens, to name just a few, while making perceptive observations on the connections with her own life. Findings The third of my library-of-friendship borrowings, 'Findings' is a loose collection of elegantly written and evocative vignettes. Most involve investigating wildlife on remote Scottish islands, but my favourites concerned Edinburgh. Jamie writes of the search for corncrakes and whales, of salmon and peregrine falcons. In Edinburgh, she recounts a trip to Surgeon's Hall museum (which I have thus far been too squeamish to visit) and views from Carlton Hill seen through a telescope. I enjoyed these novel perspectives on the city I call my home, while the more wildlife focused chapters offered a pleasing escape outside the city into places I've never been. Although I enjoyed these snapshots, though, the title is very appropriate. 'Findings' is a collection of different topics and anecdotes coincidentally found together, without a clear thread running through. It's very well written, however I tend to prefer essay collections that are more thematically focused. A diverting lockdown read, nonetheless.
Findings
It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Kathleen Jamie, award winning poet, has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer. Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings. Findings