At the youthful age of 19, Kathleen Jamie authored her earliest poetry compilation that not only clinched the Eric Gregory Award, but also manifested her exceptional talent. Today, at 60 years old, her poetry and essay collections have garnered much respect as iconic pieces of environmental writing. Yet, as she peers back at her parents’ diminishing figures, while contemplating the legacy she leaves for her progeny, Jamie wrestles with apprehension.
Jamie alludes to life’s cyclical yet linear progression in the introduction to her work, Cairn, which revisits principal themes and locales she has explored over her four-decade career. Her new body of work varies from previous collections, shedding light on the transitions from bird and sea mammal interpretations and social advocacy records that were once underpinned by the firm belief in the restorative potency of nature.
Compared to her previous works, Cairn introduces a new struggle. She questions, “How do I pen a lyric poem in the face of the world’s great dismantling?” This new anthology displays a shift from familiar, extensive forms, merging minuscule essays, poems and prose segments. This style sombrely echoes our current reality post-pandemic, where the omnipresence of tech gadgets has dented our capacity to concentrate, and the nonstop soundbites of news bring little comfort.
As each generation nears the horizon of its existence, predicting the collapse of the world seems inevitable. Nonetheless, such foreboding sentiment might exhibit more validity today than ever, considering the scourges of rampant climate change and global instability. Jamie pinpoints the quote from John Berger’s work as her epigraph that advocates for stones offering a sense of time and the past of our planet, providing slight but solid support to human resistance acts.
Cairn comprises fragments or ‘stones’, collated to potentially form a cairn, or trail marker. Serving as textual illustrations to this unsettling oeuvre, are Miek Zwamborn’s nuanced pencil sketches. Cairn sees its content as a montage of discarded contracts and shredded maps, echoing the time-honoured fears of the late middle-aged period, mingled with the sharp solastalgia characteristic of the Anthropocene era. The readers journey with Jamie into an uncertain future, sure of one thing though: “Whatever the changes, a fresh order will surface, as seen throughout the long history of our planet’s past.”