CAIRN (PB)

Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain's foremost poets and essayists and her groundbreaking works of non-fiction - Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019) - are considered pioneers and exemplars of 'new nature writing'. For the last five years, she has been working with micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments and, placed together like the stones of a cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape. Her intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger and Cairn resonates with beauty and wisdom. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times. In 2021 she was appointed Scotland's Makar or National Poet and she lives in Fife.