Can joy be found amidst extinction? How can we write of the natural world in an era of widespread climate anxiety? These are the questions asked of Kathleen Jamie’s highly-anticipated new book, Cairn, in David Robinson’s latest review.

Cairn
By Kathleen Jamie
Published by Sort Of Books

I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of Georges Couvier. Same with the word ‘eustatic’. Yet both hover around the edges of Cairn, Kathleen Jamie’s new collection of prose poems, micro-essays and personal notes, twin ghosts at the feast. 

Couvier (1769-1832) was the French naturalist and zoologist who first proved that animals could become extinct, that catastrophies such as rising sea levels (‘eustatic’ is the relevant adjective here) had happened. Until then, people had thought that the living examples of fossilised animals were around somewhere, but we just hadn’t found them yet.   

You might well pause to reflect on just how short a span of time has elapsed between the ‘discovery’ of past extinctions of life on earth (as Couvier first expounded in 1813) and the anthropogenic threats to the planet right now. But Cairn spells out the message even more starkly.  ‘It’s been a while,’ Jamie writes, ‘since we could turn to the natural world for reassurance, since we could map our individual lives against the eternal cycle of the seasons, our griefs against the consolation of birds, the hills.’ 

Thirty years ago, walking out of Stromness in the middle of a storm, and wondering whether she could make a poem about the two leading lights guiding ships safely through the Sound of Hoy, it was all so different. Back then, she could imagine one of the lights flashing out a message that nature was greater than us, that however much we harmed the planet, it would still allow us to live on it. ‘No child born since then’ she writes, ‘can believe that the natural world is so resilient. Now it sounds like out and out denial.’ 

Jamie has always chafed at narrow definitions of nature writing that divide it off from everyday realities. In her three previous books of essays – Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019) – she has broadened it to include such things as cancer cells, archaeological digs, and lunar eclipses. John Berger’s review of Findings (‘A sorceress of the essay form. Never exotic, down to earth, she renders the indefinable to the reader’s ear’) could easily apply to all three.  

The tone here is different. Still meditative, still unpretentious, her writing is now broken into fragments, many only a page long, like stones gathered on a walk and laid down as a cairn.  Each, though, is linked by one overriding thought – the kind, she writes, that hits people when they have turned sixty, and start to imagine the world without themselves in it: what kind of planet are we handing on? And (a secondary question though we secretly fear we know the answer already) what happens next? 

Jamie has said that she likes to think of her essays in the Findings Trilogy as ‘extended poems’. I never understood that: it’s as if she doesn’t accept that the essay form is wide enough to encompass that glorious mix of memoir, travel and nature that she pours into them. With Cairn, however, the comparison works far better. The pieces here are mainly prose, but the effect is that of poetry. A thought is seeded without detailed description in one piece and expanded – again, subtly and without too much elaboration – in the next, so that it blooms retrospectively, unwatered by words. In one piece, for example, Jamie remembers being in Primary 2 and mishearing a book called ‘Days in the Sun’ as ‘Daisies in the Sun’. Outside, it’s a clear summer’s day, ‘a magic high blue sky above the factories, the ICI works, the steelworks’. And that’s pretty much it.  In the next piece, she and her siblings are clearing out the attic of the family house in a heatwave and handling a Doulton figurine of Summer’s Day - ‘but wildfires were raging, incinerating birds’ nests, torching toads and snakes’ … It ends with this line ‘dear god even our summer days’. And precisely because Jamie doesn’t need to spell out the (presumably) intervening half century or so of pollution from those factories and steelworks, her point about today’s headlines of ecological devastation blighting memories of a happier past sinks in all the deeper. Miek Zwamborn’s ghostly artwork, fading and delicate, underlines these evocations of loss.  

So yes, this is a bleak book, but why shouldn’t it be?  The ‘common curlew, as the old books have it,’ writes Jamie, is now a ‘sobbing trill gliding into silence and bone’. ‘Insects … whoever thought we would miss them?’ she muses. Looking for whales, she notices the oil tankers on the Forth (‘how calm they seem, almost innocent’) and discovers that one of them is actually registered in the possibly-soon-to-disappear Marshall Islands. ‘The youngsters are saying they won’t be having children of their own,’ a friend tells her. ‘Not because they don’t want them but because they’re scared. Societal breakdown and chaos and extinctions and everything.’ 

Extinctions. Ah, let’s get back to Couvier. Or rather, to the whale named after him. In Cairn, Jamie takes us to the Whale Hall in Bergen’s Natural History Museum. It clearly has made an impact on her because she wrote about walking beneath the whales’ gigantic skeletons (‘such bones as I have never seen’) in Sightlines. Since she last visited, though, there’s the skeleton of a new specimen – a Couvier’s whale which wandered thousands of miles from its usual warm-water habitat before it beached on the Norwegian coast. Next to it are the 30-odd plastic bags that it ate in the dark depths of the ocean, probably thinking they were squid, and that slowly killed it. The bags – the kind we use to carry food home from the supermarket, are hardly changed by their time in the belly of the beast. The lettering is still legible: ‘Fresh’, it says on one. And if that’s not an answer to the question Jamie, quoting Heaney, poses a few pages later (‘How do we find images and symbols adequate to our predicament?’) I don’t know what is.  

There are, I suppose, stories on the other side of the extinction ledger if you care to search them out: a few species which are thriving as so many more disappear. There is still joy – real joy – to be found in watching a whale surface or dive deep, slapping its fluke against the sea.  You can still poeticise the persistence of a lone tree or wonder at a spider repairing its web in the wind, and Jamie does indeed do so. Couvier’s whale itself, I note, seems to be fighting off extinction remarkably successfully.  

But Cairn is too honest to leave room for facile optimism.  And honesty makes her question both how it is now possible to write a lyric poem and whether doom-scrolling might not be so reprehensible after all, and merely a way of staving off psychic damage.  Dense with thought but clear in expression, the book lives up to the definition of its title given on the back cover (‘Cairn: a marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers’) to perfection. 

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie is published by Sort Of Books, priced £9.99