The Bonniest Companie

by Kathleen Jamie

In her extraordinary new collection, Kathleen Jamie examines her native Scotland - a country at once wild and contained, rural and urban - and her place within it. In the author's own words : '2014 was a year of tremendous energy in my native Scotland, and knowing I wanted to embrace that energy and participate in my own way, I resolved to write a poem a week, and follow the cycle of the year.' The poems also venture into childhood and family memory - and look to ahead to the future. The Bonniest Company is visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.

Genres: Poetry, Scotland, Nature, British Literature

62 pages, Hardcover

First published October 8, 2015

About the author

Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and travel writer, one of a remarkable clutch of Scottish writers picked out in 1994 as the ‘new generation poets’ – it was a marketing ploy at the time but turns out to have been a very prescient selection. She became Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling in 2011.

http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....

Reviews

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful, evocative, playful, gracious, and important. Jamie's poetry is as beautifully measured as her prose.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

First off, what a cover! You could lose yourself gazing into that. Kathleen Jamie is one of my all time favourite writers, there is something about her words that just grabs me, it might be her ability to include a Scottish accent that adds another dimension to the writing, using words like “keek” and “wanchancy” are brilliant. It doesn’t matter what she writes about, cleaning whale bones, walking on the beach or geese in flight, it just works and the mundane becomes amazing.

The Bonniest Companie is a fine collection, I’m not gonna spoil things and go on and on about what the poems are about, you’ve really gotta read them yourself just to get that full experience. Check her out on Soundcloud to hear her reading a few poems. Below is one of my favourites from this book.

Thon Stane

Thon earthfast boulder by the bothy door,
Taller than a man and
thrice as broad and
older than everyone put together-
stood there in his mossy boots
like he’s just this very forenoon
wandered down the brae-
a chapman peddling bracken-besoms,
lichen-saucers
a few lampwicks of grass-
I open the door, though he gives no hawker’s cry-
just proffers his mute wares,
as he has for long enough.

Blog review can be found here> https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2017...

[Zanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perfectly nice, mostly nature poems. They just didn't hook into me at all.

This one made me feel a little bit of something

Migratory I

Mind that swan? The whooper we found
neck slack on the turf, head pointing north like a way-sign,
how you stooped and opened its wing?
I paid scant heed
to your naming of parts: coverts, ulna, primaries
being scunnert with the place, its gales and sea-roar
- but this wing - this was a proclamation!
The wind-fit, quartz-bright power of the thing! A radiant gate
one could open and slip through...
We dragged the swan to the lee of an old dyke
tucked it in neat, a white stone,
then trudged up out of the glen. At the ridge
again. we got clouted properly,
staggered on, half elated, half scared.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virtual Crossways 2021 was the Third Annual Irish Scottish Literary Festival. The focus this year was Irish language and Scottish Gaelic poetry. The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie shared a session with Dublin poet Paula Meehan. Both poets write in English. Meehan is one of my favorite poets and after hearing Jamie, I ordered several of her books.

The Bonniest Companie contains many poems that focus on nature. Much of Jamie poetry uses Scottish terms that are part of the Scots language. It is sometimes labeled a dialect, but the difference between a dialect and a language is considered by linguists to be a political question. As a linguist, I resist the term dialect. The meanings in Jamie's poems are transparent, and familiarity as well as context, helps the reader to "translate".

Jamie's poems shine a light on Scotland's stunning terrain and nature. Some of her poems are set in urban settings or suburbs. Her poems are short and succinct. Wonderful bites!
Highly recommended.

[TheNeverendingTBR · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of very short poems written during 2014, the year of the referendum on Scottish independence.

Being Scottish, I really wanted to like this - but the vast majority of them never made sense to me and it was like the poet sat with a thesaurus next to her while writing in order to come up with obscure words and working around them.

I gave it two stars out of five because a few of them were charming.

[Falcon Blackwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

First off, the cover- magnificent, I loved it. It drew me to the book.
The poems and writing within the book are undoubtedly of a quality that stands out. They are thoughtful and often beautiful. A couple seem not to fit, like makeweights, errors of judgement. Corporation Road, perhaps... others make me wish I'd written them. I've been away from Scotland for 16 years, but her use of the vernacular reminded me of words I had forgotten, words that need to be used and celebrated. None of her words seemed like she'd used a thesaurus, as one reviewer has unkindly said. In any case, why not?
A lovely book of wise, accessible writing, I have enjoyed it so much and it fills me with the hiraeth.

[Giulia Zzz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one will be appreciated by those who are already Kathleen Jamie’s fans (like me). While I have enjoyed her short essay collections much more (Findings, Sightlines, Surfacing), it was nice to read her poetry too and find similar elements of nature, of quiet observation, of moments captured, the passing of time, of Scotland.

“There’s this life and no hereafter -
I’m sure of that
But still I dither, waiting
For my laggard soul
To leap at the world’s touch”

“Be brave:
by the weird-song in the dark you’ll find your way”

“The wild ways we think we walk
Just bring us here again”

[Archie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems were poignant, others were empty, but the ones that hit, hit very hard.

A tribute to Scotland, nostalgia and longing of the past, it’s a cold journey interspersed with nuggets of warmth that make it perfect for winter reading.

6.5/10

[Antonio Ceté]

¡Complicao pero bonito!

[Rosamund · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely collection that draws on nature and the landscape but not in a saccharine way. There is an underlying theme about Scottish identity and independence I think.

[Rosy Williams]

4

[Laura Derbyshire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful and thoughtful.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scotland

[Jill Andrews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evocative, resonant poetry . Loved this.

[Eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Now here comes a squall all dressed in drab bustling toward the mainland – a smudge of rainbow clutched like a shopping bag in her right hand.”

[Matthew Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Kathleen Jamie and feel like everything's going to be alright.

How many May dawns
have I slept right through,
the trees courageous with blossom?
Let me number them...

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read much nature poetry, and was initially put off this collection by Kathleen Jamie by the rather sweet cover design of the book giving the impression that it is all about birds and mountains. However I am now very glad that I picked it up as it is about much more than that and is filled with some great poems and fantastic scenarios. It feels like a year in Scotland documented in the book, as the seasons and locations change as we go through the book. There are some engaging images too such as the "laddies in Celtic shirts" walking up Ben Lomond to leave a memorial to a wee boy or the person "oxter-deep in a bramble-grove/ glutting on wild fruit". 'Wings Over Scotland' is not about the independence website, but documents poisoned or shot birds of prey on Scottish estates. A short poem written in September 2014, shortly after the Scottish independence vote is a beautiful evocation of earlier Scots poems and a call to get "On wir feet" and begin again.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. I started reading this in the bookshop and had to buy it. I love the way that Jamie uses language in unexpected ways. She writes about nature in a way that feels fresh and never boring. Beautiful.

[Mandy Haggith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sparkling year of poems.

[T.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely... enjoyed as much, some even more, than her essays!

[Clarenced · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry that gave me pause

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, Jamie’s latest book of poetry, won the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award for 2016.

There are 47 poems here of which only two stretch over 1 page in length. Most take the form, if not the formal structure, of a sonnet, though Soledades has eight lines of what look like prose before opening out in its last three lines. Some are very short indeed. The last, Gale, has only 16 syllables, shorter than a haiku. The longest, Another You, bears out the potency of cheap music, the titular deer in The Hinds are “the bonniest companie”. Ben Lomond refers to the bonny banks in a poem which, like the song containing those lines, is about death and remembrance. 23/9/14 is an injunction to gird up again after the Scottish Independence Referendum. High Water compares ocean tides to an adulterous affair, Scotland’s Splendour scopes out the delights of memories from a book stumbled on in a charity shop, Wings Over Scotland is a litany of the recorded deaths of birds of prey on various landed estates, taken - verbatim it would seem - from the original reports.


The language Jamie uses goes from standard English to various degrees of Scots depending on the poem. Migratory II, (eftir Hölderlin) is the most uncompromisingly Scottish. The prevalence of poems about animals or landscape places Jamie’s poetry firmly within the tradition of Scottish literature.