 poetrywivenhoe - The final
gig of 2007 - Kathleen Jamie
Kathleen Jamie, who was born in Renfrewshire, studied philosophy at
Edinburgh
University. She then turned to travel, especially in the
Himalayas, something that's significantly influenced both her poetry and prose. Her
eight collections of poetry include The Queen of Sheba, Mr &
Mrs Scotland are Dead, Jizzen, and The Tree House which
between them have garnered three TS Eliot Award nominations, two Geoffrey
Faber Memorial Prizes, and two Forward Poetry Prizes. She is currently
lecturer in Creative Writing at the University
of
St Andrews.
The pull towards home and away from it informs two of the themes in
Jamie's work: Scottishness and her experience as a woman. “There
was no literature in my house, just my mother’s thrillers from the
library, and my dad’s railway books. But, because it was a Scottish
house, there were two copies of the works of Robert Burns; I took them off
the shelf now and again. I think that to become the writer I am now took a
lot of overcoming and ground-clearing; I had to work through the
expectation to write ‘as a woman’ or ‘as a Scot’. Those issues
were fashionable then, and our gender, background, identity all need
negotiating with, but they’re not the be-all and end-all! I was
well into my thirties, had already published two or three books when a new
friend (poet Don Paterson, now my editor) took me by the shoulders
and shook me; he said ‘talent is a responsibility, not an unearned
privilege.’ He meant I had a duty to develop it, push it. "
Only in
her most recent collection, The Tree House, has Jamie been free to
leave behind the distracting issues of gender and national and personal
identity, to move towards what she originally set out to be: a nature poet
asking, in these latest poems, how human beings can live in a right
relationship with the natural world.
Chris Tanner
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