Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her Work

Kathleen Jamie’s works are classics. No one can read Kathleen Jamie and remain indifferent or unchanged. Nationally acclaimed since her first major publications in the 1980s, Jamie stands out from other contemporary poets in her exceptional musicality, her strikingly unusual perspectives, her wry humour, translucent imagery, and hard-edged economy of expression. These 16 newly commissioned critical essays and 7 previously unpublished poems by leading poets make up the first full-length study of Kathleen Jamie’s writing. The essays discuss all of her poetry collections, including The Queen of Sheba (1994), Jizzen (1999), Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980-94 (2002), The Tree House (2004) and The Overhaul (2012), as well as her travel writing, including Among Muslims (2002), her nature writing, Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) and her collaborative work, including Frissure (2013), with artist Brigid Collins. Whether engaging with national politics, with gender, with landscape and place, or with humanity’s relation to the natural environment, this volume demonstrates that Kathleen Jamie’s verse teaches us new ways of listening, of seeing and of living in the contemporary world.

Reviews of Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her Work

"Rachel Falconer has drawn together a team of knowledgeable essayists whose work covers a great deal of necessary ground and is complemented by some fine tributary poems. Anyone interested in Kathleen Jamie – and that's an increasing number of people, including, I think, general readers of literature – will profit from this book." – Neil Corcoran, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Liverpool