My favourite in this collection of essays is ‘In Quinhagak’, where Scottish nature writer and poet Kathleen Jamie travels to a small village by the Bering Sea, mainly home to Yup’ik people. She makes genuine connections with people she spends time with there, noticing different ways of experiencing time, and alternative ways of relating to history and land. She finds the Yup’ik people’s ownership of their land, and care for it, intriguing, contrasting it with the almost total private ownership of land in Scotland (p. 89).
In ‘Links of Noltland 1’, working alongside archaeologists on remote Orkney, Jamie gets to see Neolithic treasures near their original sites, including the famous Westray Wife (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_Wife). She is invited for dinner with a group at a colleague’s house. After dinner, “…the others were sprawled on their orange sofas watching some old Quentin Tarantino film on Netflix. They looked like the seals hauled out on the weedy shore. If seals could watch Netflix, they would” (p. 154). The humour throughout the book reminded me how much I loved her raucous poem The Queen of Sheba (https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/queen-sheba).
Inevitably, the climate emergency shadows everything. Jamie is thoughtful about it, and is not defeated. She notes impacts observed by people living on land they have been familiar with for generations. “We all know it. We can’t go on like this, but we wouldn’t go back either, to the stone ploughshare and the early death. Maybe that’s why the folk here don’t embrace their Neolithic site much. It’s all too close to the knuckle.” (p. 156). Early trips to Tibet, and memories of her mother and grandmother, make this a wide-ranging and always interesting collection.
As a huge fan of her previous collections Sightlines and Findings, I had asked for this for my birthday and was delighted to get it. Reflective, enjoyable, and enlightening.
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