Cairn

Author: Kathleen Jamie

Literary essays

Published on 13^th June 2024 by Sort of Books in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 144 pages
198mm x 128mm | 179g

Cairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers.

For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape. The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.

Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.