VOICE OF THE WOOD - an extract from SURFACING by Kathleen Jamie

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VOICE OF THE WOOD - an extract from SURFACING by Kathleen Jamie

Voice of the Wood

SO YOU’VE REALLY GONE AND DONE IT THIS TIME you are lost in the wood how did that happen? The crazed Scots pines camped all around and blaeberries beneath and bracken shrivelled because it’s October and you stand hearing nothing, the non-sound of one leaf dropping to join its siblings on the ground…

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Surfacing is Guardian Book of The Day→

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“First, there’s the quality of the noticing eye, the poet’s ability to look deeply at a landscape, a person, a situation, and then to summon it on the page with what Robert Lowell called “the grace of accuracy”. Then there’s Jamie’s particular talent for nature writing, the way that she weaves eagles, ragwort, snow buntings, caribou and all the rest of the natural world into her prose so that they lose the otherness that can distance them from our experience. Nature in Jamie’s writing is immediate, domestic and, well, natural… a book whose impact is accretive and, eventually, astonishing.”