Surfacing

Kathleen Jamie has a unique voice for teasing out poetic responses to landscape while also telling stories with a deceptive ease. This collection is about digging up stories of the past, with some shorter chapters surrounding three longer ones. The shorter are responsive while the longer are the centre-points for the book, and each deals with a different archaeology. The first of the three takes place in the Arctic tundra, where Jamie visits an archaeological dig with people from the Yup'ik culture who are collecting objects from hundreds of years ago that are being revealed by the melting ice. The second is at an archaeological dig on Westray island in Scotland on a prehistorical site of living. The third is an unearthing of Jamie's own memory, through her rediscovering a notebook from a trip to Tibet in her early 20s, at the time of the student protests in China. The sections weave together into a story (and a poem) about the marks that are made and erased in places.

As with all of Jamie's writing, the book has a wonderful, slow and thoughtful pace, and teases out its truer meaning as it progresses. While it is seamless when at its best, I felt the earlier sections a little too slow and too weighted with travelogue detail, but this is easily overlooked as the book progresses. The second half of the book is immaculate, and contains so many thoughtful passages and joyful moments that I feel like I have visited many of the places that Jamie makes real through words. The unearthing has taken place, and now all that is left is to decide what to do with all these stories.

Kathleen Jamie is one of my favourite writers, she has the ability to capture the magic out of the smallest thing and come up with beautiful words to describe it.  In Surfacing she is removing a layer to see what is underneath, archaeological digs in Alaska and on the isle of Westray revealing human history, losing a parent, kids moving out and searching for what that means for her.  

There are 3 big essay's here, two of them are the digs and the third is about time spent in Xiahe in Tibet when China shut the borders down and the students rose in protest.  All three of them draw you in and it feels as if you are there, you sense the cold in Alaska, the wind of the Orkneys and the quiet of the monastery at Xiahe.  Mixed in between are some short pieces, observations of things around us that we would normally miss, driving along and seeing an eagle and getting lost in the moment watching it glide effortlessly without beating it's wings.

A couple of favourite chapters of mine were the 3rd part of Links of Noltland, thinking of the people who lived there 5000 years ago and asking them question after question about their lives. Then there is A Tibetan Dog, a cancer scare and turning a dream of a memory on it's head, that was some mind blowing stuff.  I enjoyed the Links of Noltland sections so much I did a bit of googling to look for pictures and I laughed when I saw one photo of the team and found that Kathleen's descriptions of their clothing was spot on.

Fascinating stuff as always and as usual I'm left jealous of her experiences.

Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2020/08/16/surfacing-by-kathleen-jamie/