The Way We Live

by Kathleen Jamie

54 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1988

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

[James Askari · Rating 3 out of 5]

A young woman's poems of love, risk and adventure, travel (including down the Silk Road by bus and on foot) and exposure to Godhead, perhaps as a metaphor for the emotional intensity and 'commitment' of the other personal states. Jamie is dating a mountaineer likened to St. Paul for his 'denial' that he dreams of anything but falling, or implicitly that anything but climbing means anything to him; hugging her, he looks for 'holds' (this is a version, Jamie acknowledges, of the poet's holding to symbols). The couple crash harmlessly in a car on a winding lochside road in the dawn, Jamie anticipating getting so plastered that evening that, imagining an 'alternative universe[]' conflagration in which they're 'as readily consumed, as volatile/as figures etched in petrol'. When he once sets out without her, she sees the 'grave-goods strapped to his back'.

There are lighter poems in this first short collection (a whimsical piece in which God is a Yorkshire garden centre manager, who cuts his own 'toenails to meet demand for crescent moons') and short narratives of older family members' wartime experiences (one man combs the moors with five others for a downed German aircraft, coming home with the pilot's seat and missing what may be a Christmas goose); but the prevailing tone is high, and the language does not need to force itself, or adopt a manner, to rise to significant experience. On the Karakoram Highway, the Indus, still a mountain river, 'brawls beneath us, self-obsessed/narcissistic'. It is permanent midnight at a checkpoint. There are dubious figures, hangers-on, holy men on he bus. The rock is St. Peter's rock as well as rock; and Jamie never parts from the quotidian. What is finally impressive is Jamie's not needing, in poems of place like 'Clearances' or 'Bosegran' (her spelling is bad throughout), to match her language to an occasion or any given. There are short questions at the end of the line, and exclamations across the line. The language is bare and roomy.