Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World

Award-winning Scottish poet and essayist Jamie writes of her immersions in nature and history in 14 finely tooled, scrubbed, rinsed, and polished essays. As shrewdly bemused as she is intently observant, as imaginatively interpretive as she is curious, Jamie travels to the Arctic, where she ponders time, vastness, and vulnerability. Jamie excavates her memories of the summer following her graduation from high school, when she worked at an archaeological dig, gleaning experiences that inspire far-reaching musings about our ancestors, art, and burial. She visits a raucous island colony of gannets, where the seabirds seem timeless, though disconcerting bits of plastic are woven into their seaweed nests. Jamie becomes entranced by a magnificent collection of suspended whale skeletons in a Norwegian museum and enchanted by the moon’s “pewtery, equalizing light.” So fully does she give herself over to all that she witnesses, so unexpected are her perceptions, that Jamie’s lustrous essays recharge our appreciation not only for the world’s beauty and mystery but also for the gift poetic writers such as Jamie possess for translating sensory input into gloriously calibrated, revelatory language.