Poet, novelist, essayist (interesting his essays Findings (2005) Scottish flora and fauna, and Sightlines (2012) on the Orkney), born in Renfrewshire, Scotland, in 1962, he studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He has published several collections of poetry: Black Spiders (1982); The Way We Live (1987); The Queen of Sheba (1994), Jizzen (1999), The Tree House (2004), The Overhaul (2012), The Bonniest Companie (2015), received several prestigious awards, such as a Somerset Maugham Award, a Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem), a Paul Hamlyn Award and a Creative Scotland Award. Twice won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
Its volume of selected poems, Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead (2002), which collects most of the poetry written from 1980 to 1994, was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2004 his collection The Tree House (2004) won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) in 2005 and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. His collection, The Overhaul (2012) won the prestigious Costa Award and was a finalist for the TS Eliot Prize. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2011 became Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling.
The rejection of all traditional Scottish soul and social obstruction, is not only rebellion or human movement, is the lushness of belonging that must renew itself to be returned to itself. A tradition that has no renewal museum tinsel, do not feed, dusty remains stale in the bedroom of the time consumed, without the soul regenerate.
Here is the arrival of the uncanny, the Queen of Sheba, who leads the rebellion, disrupting every social pettiness and prejudice, covering beauty and identification, pre-existing voltage of a women's choir. She appears between peat and the Pentland Hills fern, moss Curriehill Road, "cries the wisest of our men / put it to the test: / Beat Scotland in search of a Solomon! / As expected: there from the back of the crowd / someone growls; / But who you think you are? / And a thousand girls laughing with you / we take breath / and shout / THE QUEEN OF SHEBA! ":
"Scotland, you have invoked the name / one too / Presbyterians in your living rooms. / You have heard, yes / even in pagan Arabia / your volpigno bark of poverty, inherited / like long nose, a stubbornness vein / a ceramic dog that never you liked it / but which you can not undo. " (The Queen of Sheba).
It is not a gender issue or membership regionalist, the face of the man who writes poetry, is truly liberated from the scene that involves, by the freedom that occupies its page, and the consequent risk of an endless melee , its elementary question, not being a woman or write literature by women:
"See those of flint tips file / in our large archaeological museums / so lavish in Edinburgh - / Do you ever ask questions about our history? [...] are no arrowheads ones / but Grandma languages exposure / tenacious languages grandmothers / all dead and buried / back to the peat and streams, / except to their tongues / abrupt and sharp, preserved / to generations in the ground / amulets evil, preserved / all quiet in glass cases in the shadows / of our museums, and / will not betray. But if you dare / dream and fantasize / Hunter gone, the deer fled wise; / Silent ... and feel, / because they never stop mumbling [...] "(Arrowheads).
The question of identity arises, in the poem by Kathleen Jamie, as a primordial and original substrate projected nell'ultimità, punctuated by nature as a curtain of the living world, in which the eyes lay their sparks and tastano signs of a genesis . Knowing here is born with, or be re-born.
And it is the details of the emerging world (animals, birds, flowers, trees, Scottish natural landscape), that poetry builds up its sap and its principle. It is enrolled nature "can be that vast wilderness of the great Scottish landscapes, islands now uninhabited and their archaeological sites, the colonies of gannets, orcas and whales, such as the one that she can see from her kitchen window, binoculars always at hand, but in both cases the conversation and interaction with the natural world is always present. "
It is the archaic spelling unspeakable shadowing of old, be blind stone scattered in the past, where the margin of the flight you drag across the sky. An immense sky and guarded in the wind moan that drives a sound, perhaps human, desolate. An incessant cries, as in a shortage, the air that moves.
It reads in Flocks of geese:
"Flocks of geese write a word / crossing the sky. A word / beat like a gong / before I was born. / The sky moves like cattle bellowing. / I'm empty like stone, like fields / plowed but not seeded, naked / and blind as a stone. Blind / the word, blind to every sound except the call of geese. / Barbed wire wraps, archaic handwriting / a gate. The barbels / do signals to the wind as if / was deaf. The word whistles / too strong for my senses. Street. / Not like the past littered with / around here. Neither sudden death. / Not like a lover who will learn / to know, forever connected. / The flight margin dragging across the sky. / What they write on the birds twilight? / A word ever spoken or read. / The flocks turn home, / the wind silent groan, a sound / maybe human, desolate. "
Kathleen Jamie performs in Jizzen ( "the birth bed," 1999), a revamped interior geography that leads to fulfillment in memories including recalls and re-enactments, to bring to light the astonished and numinous space.
Here is a poetic gesture rammemorativo sound that refers to detail to vibrate. The hue sensory and auditory helps to understand a thing that will come up pussy in all its splendor reminiscent shadowy. Retrace is primordially recall what shows on the surface, to make it right, do not lose it, dissotterarlo as a special universal.
It is the primitive suspension of time on Earth, making passage of the banks, reconvene nostalgia of joys and debris, limits and exceeded borders to be poetry that creates, which recovers the lost lines, bringing back, finally, the world 'from a nest twittering / propelled from the barrel "or" a stunned boat of saints ", filed on the phosphorescence of the waters that sparkle on fingers, and rowing on the bow dart:
"Remember how were rowing toward the cottage / the bay drawn scythe, / that night after the pubs / let us go into his revolving doors / and pushed into the gravel / water until moistened hips / Loch whispered the word" boat"? / I do not remember who rowed. The jokes stopped. / The thud of oars, the crunch and the lapping / loch was prolonged into the night. / In the run I was afraid: / the cool shawl breeze, / the humped hills; what the water concealed / between nuclear logs and boats clockwork. [...] Of course, it was reckless, a loch so great, the tide, / but we are alive - and we even had children / with women and men not yet met / that night we went out, and reclamammo as our / the sky and the ' brackish water, the injured / hills of black peppered blueberries, / our glittering anklets in the shallow / issavamo while the oars and jumped down / to pull the boat aground on the beach cottage. "
The world in labor, revived or rediscovered, it is not only the signal of the external dimension, but also, as in his poetry, the result of an ultrasound, which becomes a lullaby and then last prayer, so that the heart of the newborn child can survive his.
All writing Kathleen Jamie seems to arise from a primal tremor, in which the individual feeling, and unique, embodies the universal power of existence. It is from this primordial astonishment that all begins, as the first detail that repeats the centuries-bards, or the first sweet and crazy weeks old, surrendered as a hint of spring that is sailing on the west, before lifting the shoes " a rare flight of swans, "" hills on which shrinks the snow. "
It is a waiting motherhood that it turns into a visionary promise, like quicksilver raised "in a sound network, / then pity, lowered" as the solstice the days that open, thawing of a redelivered the world in a beautiful spiral, welcome filled to the simple things and aligned stars of Orion:
"[...] and although it involved a trip / on snow darkened, / arms occupied yourself in a blanket, / I had to walk up to the top of the garden, / to tap into a knowing homage among equals, the trunks / spiral of our plum trees, moss, / the place robin sull'agrifoglio. / With your back on the station wall, / I tried to remember; / But even my fingerprints were erased / and the rising stars of Orion / denied what I knew: that while we came / launched on a litter between the revolving doors of the delivery room, / they were there, lined up on the ceiling, / lighted anxiety / difficult for that assignment, / before we were two, from my one. "
Until sperdutezza of the run weeping ego narrator, who imagine putting in a basket of woven reeds his gift (novello Mosè), worked from Firth, slowly slipped into a river.
This motherhood, then, is the fierce revival of lost time, or his attempt at least. A poem-woman shakes tranquility, which states the fearless acrid and sweet spirit of rhododendron, which hides the inner being "native / as language or human memory / of our soil slightly acidic."
The poem by Kathleen Jamie follows this path of rebirth and of belonging with utmost transparency. Even in the wreckage, debris in time, we see a fullness that is secular, not a vacuum, but a lack filled with wonder, like water untouched dating from the well: "Imagine the sails fly like swans, / women transported broken / while the howling horns, / and bars of the doors slamming / inside this cavity, where a thrush's nest. "
The re-enactment is a method of distances that approach. It is the work of women who bend and explain the linen or the skin of a selkie tucked behind a rock, and poetry must chase this continuous birth and immortal: "[...] sunlight Feathers, reflected by the butter knife / flicker on ceiling / and a last sharp twist of the shoulders / she gives birth to my daughter, and to follow / the placenta, as a handful of purple seaweed. "
Such immortality is expressed in striking Spirea additions, in which, being the reappearance, at first buried in a psalm gloomy, it riapproprierà with drops of life of the lips and the summer suits: "So they buried her, and they looked toward home, / a psalm gloomy / enveloped them like fog, / they did not know that the liquid / dripping from her lips / would have made its way down there [...]. "
Until sperdutezza of the run weeping ego narrator, who imagine putting in a basket of woven reeds his gift (novello Mosè), worked from Firth, slowly slipped into a river.
This motherhood, then, is the fierce revival of lost time, or his attempt at least. A poem-woman shakes tranquility, which states the fearless acrid and sweet spirit of rhododendron, which hides the inner being "native / as language or human memory / of our soil slightly acidic."
The poem by Kathleen Jamie follows this path of rebirth and of belonging with utmost transparency. Even in the wreckage, debris in time, we see a fullness that is secular, not a vacuum, but a lack filled with wonder, like water untouched dating from the well: "Imagine the sails fly like swans, / women transported broken / while the howling horns, / and bars of the doors slamming / inside this cavity, where a thrush's nest. "
The re-enactment is a method of distances that approach. It is the work of women who bend and explain the linen or the skin of a selkie tucked behind a rock, and poetry must chase this continuous birth and immortal: "[...] sunlight Feathers, reflected by the butter knife / flicker on ceiling / and a last sharp twist of the shoulders / she gives birth to my daughter, and to follow / the placenta, as a handful of purple seaweed. "
Such immortality is expressed in striking Spirea additions, in which, being the reappearance, at first buried in a psalm gloomy, it riapproprierà with drops of life of the lips and the summer suits: "So they buried her, and they looked toward home, / a psalm gloomy / enveloped them like fog, / they did not know that the liquid / dripping from her lips / would have made its way down there [...]. "
Just as the oblong expanse of the moon, with few stars, illuminates an interior: the strings of beads, desk, books, waiting to light that moves to a sketch of flowers on the wall or on the pine floor. The first detail how impossible the last sign of beauty extended. The preferred look is enlivened by a unique and unrepeatable relationship, where breathing becomes next, lack franta or defeat, the disproportion of primitive shapes, are saved by the infinitesimal astonishment that impregnates, through the power of nature and its Event:
"[...] - but red berries / hawthorn is tended towards me, / and among fallen leaves / bloomed white / late flowers. I tried / to call you, or I / I did, but your name / withered on my tongue, / [...] I might disappear for a living, / maybe seven years! - / and a joie de vivre so sudden / when I swung open a ditch / front suddenly / it jumped, light as a ragazzina- / yes, I jumped net, / without even thinking about it. " (Spell).
The latest collection, The Bonniest Companie (2015), has an infinite speed of perceptual performance that follows the forms of matter and impress of reality: its houses and sheets of Machado in the breeze, his family and lack of meaning peek figures a distant affection, and finally, the hybridization of linguistic and territorial boundaries (cliffs, valleys, mountains, beaches), "the jagged edge of the earth", the clouds on the run, the kiss salty Fianuis, where listening to "a short stillness, / the notes of a pipit small as seeds. "
Kathleen The poem is announced here in all its temporal and temporary range, but in which, often, imagination suffers failure and fractures, flows and cycles, as the twilight time that goes away, fading away, clinging to its roots ( even in the choice of words, close to the past), when the soul, steeped in history, will jump to touch the world:
"A trek of three hundred meters, then a pile of old pietre- / manual work, / and still the same river, which sparkled / there / when the Romans came, they saw, / and soon they reconsidered. / Too many mountains, too many / threatening tribes / whose habits do not garberebbero much / (but maybe we equal to) / Nordic too gray, too much snow in the distance. / Come on, let's stop here, we take breath / and inhale the sweet broom / scent that is blooming now / look down there for miles, from now / and until they return the lynx, and wolf. " (Glacial).
JAMIE K., La casa sull’albero, a cura di Giorgia Sensi, Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, Borgomanero (No) 2016.
SENSI G., Introduzione, Jamie K., La casa sull’albero, p. 15.
ID., cit., pp.8-9.
ID., cit., p.11.
CONNOLLY C., A writer’s life: Kathleen Jamie, (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3632092/A-writers-life-Kathleen-Jamie.html), November 21, 2004.
KELLAWAY K., The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie, review (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/19/kathleen-jamie-the-overhaul-review), January 19, 2013.
Il titolo rimanda agli ultimi versi della ballata tardo medievale del Cavaliere elfico Tam Lin, trascritta da Robert Burns nel 1792. Nella poesia Le cerve (The hinds), la poetessa, in una densa atmosfera di sonno e veglia, ricrea l’agile durezza di diciannove cervi, attraverso una predominanza acustica e una fluidità di movimento, che richiamano a una condizione (si pensi a Janet opposta alla Regina delle Fate nella ballata) simbolica moderna (con riferimento alla campagna per l’indipendenza della Scozia), compresa in una mimesi topografica e in una stratificata progressione temporale, affermate nella libertà finale. Per una interessante ricognizione del testo vedi: RUMENS C., Poem of the week: The hinds by Kathleen Jamie, “The Guardian”, (https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/oct/05/poem-of-the-week-the-hinds-by-kathleen-jamie), October 5, 2015.
POWER P., The Bonniest Companie by Kathleen Jamie, “The London Magazine”, December 22, 2015.