Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World

From an award-winning poet and essayist, fourteen essays on nature that recalibrate how we relate to the natural world.

When poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie was questioned at a conference about the urgency to reconnect with "nature", she wondered, what exactly, did that really mean? In Sightlines, Jamie reports back "from the field", offering a landmark work about the natural world and our relationship to it.

In extraordinarily precise language rarely more precise, Jamie both explores her native Scottish surroundings, interweaving personal history with the physical landscape, before and sails sailing north to encounter whalebones and icebergs. She dissects whatever her gaze falls upon, micro or macro; from vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, to orcas rounding a headland, to the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea. Written with enormous precision and subtlety, Sightlines invites us to take a moment to pause and reconsider all that nature gives us.

"This intelligent collection of 14 essays, informed by science and myth, heightened attention, and cultural dreams, is written with Scots brogue, language, and attitude that will give American readers a fresh view of nature. Annoyed by the rosy stories of sea lions and polar bears at a conference of scientists and artists, Scottish poet Jamie (The Overhaul), whose mother had recently died, wonders about the nature of nature: 'Where did it reside?... What are vaccinations for, if not to make a formal disconnection from some of these wondrous other species?' Her musings take her to the Arctic to witness the aurora borealis, a pathology lab to view microscopic tumor landscapes, and to ponder time and legend through a lunar eclipse while staring out her own window. But visits to harsh Scottish island landscapes predominate, with the unsolvable mysteries of whales, endangered birds, and lost human cultures serving as recurrent themes. At one point Jamie recognizes a whale she sighted earlier at an island 180 miles and a year away: ' â€˜Believe what you see,' say the eye-trained naturalists. Aye, right. Most of the time you'll sound like an idiot. But once in a blue moon you might be right. You just might be making the same journeys as these other creatures, all of us alive at the same time on the planet.' 20 b&w photos. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge, & White. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"When the day ended with time for questions, I had some turning in my head . . . About 'nature,' mostly, which we were exhorted to reconnect with. What was it, exactly, and where did it reside?"

With her poet's eye and naturalist's affinity for wild places, Kathleen Jamie reports from the field in this enthralling collection of fourteen essays whose power derives from the stubborn attention she pays to everything around her. Jamie roams her native Scottish "byways and hills" and sails north to encounter whalebones and icebergs. Interweaving personal history with her scrutiny of landscape, Jamie dissects whatever her gaze falls upon--from vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, to orcas rounding a headland, to the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea. Written with precision, subtlety, and wry humor, Sightlines urges us to "Keep looking. Keep looking, even when there's nothing much to see."

Kathleen Jamie, one of the UK's foremost poets, is the author of four books of poetry and three nonfiction titles, including this one. In January 2013, she won the Costa Book Award, and she has won numerous other prestigious poetry awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award, Forward Poetry Prize of the Year, and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award (twice). Her essay "Pathologies" appeared in Granta's "New Nature Writing" issue. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Stirling and lives with her family in Fife, Scotland.