Book review: ‘Cairn’ by Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie is my favourite writer, so it was pretty much inevitable I was going to love this book—which I did. It’s a magnificent collection of what Jamie describes as ‘short pieces, micro-essays, pages, call them what you will […] about incidents, memories, moments that caught my attention’.

Written around the time Jamie turned 60, Cairn might have been published with this particular reader in mind: I first read it aged 59½, and much of what Jamie has to say about getting older, entering a new phase in one’s life, and recognising ‘It’s time to move on, toward whatever happens next’ very much resonated with me.

All the pieces in this collection are short—many of them less than a page. As always, Jamie’s immaculate, seemingly effortless prose is composed with a poet’s precision. It’s lean—never a word out of place. The economy of her phrasing can be breathtaking. A day after I spent half an hour watching a buzzard hovering in the updraught of an Anglesey headland, pondering how I might describe this inelegant imitation of a kestrel, I read the following, and realised I should give up writing immediately:

a buzzard arrived, hanging with folded wings like an anvil in the air

…an anvil in the air is a perfect description of what I watched, but could never so describe, above that headland.

Jamie’s subject-matter is as eclectic as her fans would expect: watching a river dredger with an imagined ghost; listening to the Shipping Forecast; a quartz pebble; attending a climate-change rally; whale-watching from a hilltop; scattering ashes at a reservoir; spiders’ webs; raindrops on phone wires; plastic bags in a museum display-case; a curlew’s skull; painting a door; and more (I nearly said etcetera, but what would that even mean?). There are moments of beautiful melancholy and nostalgia, but Jamie never lays them on thick: she’s too good a writer for that.

Cairn is a book for our time, in which former certainties of the natural world are vanishing, but in which there are still wonders to be found if you pay close enough attention and make the most of what time is left to you.

Fantastic.