Keynote
The first U.S. publication of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, author of The Tree House, winner of the 2004 Forward Prize for best collection
Book Title
Waterlight
Subtitle
Selected Poems
Cover Image
- “Read Waterlight: Selected Poems…Kathleen Jamie describes ordinary things—a puddle, a brooch, some frogs—with the rhythm of plain speech made starkly dramatic."—Entertainment Weekly
Body
For over twenty years, Kathleen Jamie has been writing the poetry that has established her as "the leading Scottish poet of her generation" (The Sunday London Times). Lyrical and meditative, her poems engage the natural world and human society with an authentic, earthly spirituality.
Selected Poems at last makes Jamie's work available to American readers. Her poetry—rendered sometimes in the Scots dialect, sometimes in the celebratory bursts of a naturalist's field guide—confronts gender, sex, landscape, and nationhood with the vivacity of an essential poetic voice.
Praise for Kathleen Jamie:
"This fierce, blanched singing verse is exquisitely gathered by a fine ear: here is a poet who knows how to break her lines, how to warm her syntax, how to repeat and exhort, how to tilt and dangle."—James Wood, London Review of Books
"Not only is [Kathleen Jamie] reaching new heights both technically and imaginatively, but to me, this collection is a very significant development on the contemporary lyric, challenging its precepts. It questions the conventions with which we observe and describe nature...and it removes the human ego."—Lavinia Greenlaw, The Independent
"With each successive theme to which Jamie turns her vision she brings the gift of insight and mystery...poetry of stunning clarity and musicality."—Scotsman
Selected Poems at last makes Jamie's work available to American readers. Her poetry—rendered sometimes in the Scots dialect, sometimes in the celebratory bursts of a naturalist's field guide—confronts gender, sex, landscape, and nationhood with the vivacity of an essential poetic voice.
Praise for Kathleen Jamie:
"This fierce, blanched singing verse is exquisitely gathered by a fine ear: here is a poet who knows how to break her lines, how to warm her syntax, how to repeat and exhort, how to tilt and dangle."—James Wood, London Review of Books
"Not only is [Kathleen Jamie] reaching new heights both technically and imaginatively, but to me, this collection is a very significant development on the contemporary lyric, challenging its precepts. It questions the conventions with which we observe and describe nature...and it removes the human ego."—Lavinia Greenlaw, The Independent
"With each successive theme to which Jamie turns her vision she brings the gift of insight and mystery...poetry of stunning clarity and musicality."—Scotsman
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About the Author
Credit: Alan Young
Praise
- “She is a global Scot, fully at home in the local landscape she precisely observed and conversant with the larger world.”—Booklist
- "[Jamie is] a cool customer with a piercing eye for the naturally sublime and a sharp ear for laconic incantation."—Boston Globe
- “This fierce, blanched singing verse is exquisitely gathered by a fine ear: here is a poet who knows how to break her lines, how to warm her syntax, how to repeat and exhort, how to tilt and dangle.”—London Review of Books
- “American readers can now meet a sensibility who attends to the living world, and the world as made in language with wily intelligence.”—Boston Review
