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lauren_endnotes's review
5.0
"You are placed in landscape, you are placed in time. But, within that, there’s a bit of room for manoeuvre. To some extent, you can be author of your own fate."
▪️SIGHTLINES by Kathleen Jamie, 2014.
#ReadtheWorld21
▪️SIGHTLINES by Kathleen Jamie, 2014.
#ReadtheWorld21
lindquist's review against another edition
3.0
Levande berättelser om expeditioner och besök i valsal i Norge. Intressant och lärorikt berättat av en nyfiken poet och skribent. Enformigheten drar ner betyget för min del.
dancarey_404's review
4.0
This set of essays trends more towards memoire + natural history than the other way 'round. Not that that is a bad thing. Just a little different than I had expected. Nonetheless, a very satisfying read.
[Audiobook note: I highly recommend the audiobook because the author is Scottish and so is the narrator, Ruth Urquhart. It really adds to the stories' sense of place.]
[Audiobook note: I highly recommend the audiobook because the author is Scottish and so is the narrator, Ruth Urquhart. It really adds to the stories' sense of place.]
karabc19's review
5.0
Kathleen Jamie’s collection of fourteen essays is subtitled “A Conversation with the Natural World,” but “conversation” seems too loose a word for the tightly conceived, brilliantly developed meditations that offer the reader dense, gorgeous descriptions of one very particular part of the natural world and deep, philosophical insights into humans’ relationship with it. However, it does suggest the way she approached the natural world, which is not as a conquerer, thrill-seeker, or looking to test her mettle, but as a compassionate friend and attentive listener. Sightlines is Walden set in the cold, isolated North Atlantic. Like Thoreau, Jamie details an immersive experience of the natural world in sensual terms, often setting it up with a pull toward the freedom of escape and isolation, juxtaposing modernity with nature (instead of a train, there is a helicopter), and guiding us toward metaphors to deepen our reading of nature. In many ways Sightlines surpasses Walden in its intent, tone, and beauty. Where Thoreau will occasionally lapse into didacticism, Jamie is suggestive and respectful. Each time the reader opens the book to a new essay, she is setting off to sea.
Her first essay “Aurora” about a cruise that she takes through Greenland’s fjords gives us the grand imagery of icebergs. Giant masses of floating ice with a deadly history to humankind would be a perfect opportunity to set a romantic tone for the book: encountering the sublime in the incomprehensible ginormity of the iceberg, simultaneously feeling one’s smallness and connection to a larger whole in this confrontation, and the resulting contemplation of one’s mortality. Jamie beautifully resists this romanticism and sets an entirely different tone for her book: “Someone calls, ‘They’re so . . . organic!’ But organic is just what they’re not. Their shapes and forms are without purpose, adapted to no end. They are huge and utterly meaningless.” The “greater existence” of the iceberg is hidden underwater, but Jamie does not tug this tempting thread. It’s not because Jamie is not contemplative. Far from it. But she does not bog herself or the book down in idealism, in trying to master the huge questions of the world and life. She writes about huge objects—icebergs, whales, and a vast, cold ocean—but she views them as an anthropologist and journalist: she studies smaller fragments of them, she connects the objects to human history and interaction, and the reader enjoys being witness to where her curiosity leads her. Through her thorough descriptions, Jamie lets the reader decide what to make of the natural world, what purpose and meaning its wonders might reveal, and what our own relationship to it might be. In “On Rona,” she finds a saint’s cell: “I crept in just to wonder what he did in there, Ronan; to imagine him right there, in front of the altar, wrapped in darkness, rapt in prayer, closed off from the sensory world, the better to connect with . . . what?” On the one hand, Jamie is questioning how one can possibly connect with anything more meaningful by closing off sensory experience. And on the other hand, it is the question: What are we hoping to connect with when we go off into the remote wilderness?
The brilliance of Jamie’s book is that she resists coming to conclusions about the meaning and purpose of nature, because that would be an aggressive and unfair thing to do to nature. Like Thoreau, she wants to offer a record of the natural world, perhaps before it disappears by our hand. Unlike the Thoreauvian impulse to sound its depths for answers, be spiritually renewed by it, or prove oneself by it, Jamie quietly observes, listens, delights in, and appreciates the natural world without expectation or judgment. Instead of Emerson’s reaching for what was beyond the physical world, trying to extend his vision beyond the horizon, Jamie’s sightlines stay firmly in the visible world, to what is in front of her. And it is thus in Jamie’s imagining of the natural world—a world far more physically remote than Walden—that we feel the most connected to it rather than apart from or above it.
Her first essay “Aurora” about a cruise that she takes through Greenland’s fjords gives us the grand imagery of icebergs. Giant masses of floating ice with a deadly history to humankind would be a perfect opportunity to set a romantic tone for the book: encountering the sublime in the incomprehensible ginormity of the iceberg, simultaneously feeling one’s smallness and connection to a larger whole in this confrontation, and the resulting contemplation of one’s mortality. Jamie beautifully resists this romanticism and sets an entirely different tone for her book: “Someone calls, ‘They’re so . . . organic!’ But organic is just what they’re not. Their shapes and forms are without purpose, adapted to no end. They are huge and utterly meaningless.” The “greater existence” of the iceberg is hidden underwater, but Jamie does not tug this tempting thread. It’s not because Jamie is not contemplative. Far from it. But she does not bog herself or the book down in idealism, in trying to master the huge questions of the world and life. She writes about huge objects—icebergs, whales, and a vast, cold ocean—but she views them as an anthropologist and journalist: she studies smaller fragments of them, she connects the objects to human history and interaction, and the reader enjoys being witness to where her curiosity leads her. Through her thorough descriptions, Jamie lets the reader decide what to make of the natural world, what purpose and meaning its wonders might reveal, and what our own relationship to it might be. In “On Rona,” she finds a saint’s cell: “I crept in just to wonder what he did in there, Ronan; to imagine him right there, in front of the altar, wrapped in darkness, rapt in prayer, closed off from the sensory world, the better to connect with . . . what?” On the one hand, Jamie is questioning how one can possibly connect with anything more meaningful by closing off sensory experience. And on the other hand, it is the question: What are we hoping to connect with when we go off into the remote wilderness?
The brilliance of Jamie’s book is that she resists coming to conclusions about the meaning and purpose of nature, because that would be an aggressive and unfair thing to do to nature. Like Thoreau, she wants to offer a record of the natural world, perhaps before it disappears by our hand. Unlike the Thoreauvian impulse to sound its depths for answers, be spiritually renewed by it, or prove oneself by it, Jamie quietly observes, listens, delights in, and appreciates the natural world without expectation or judgment. Instead of Emerson’s reaching for what was beyond the physical world, trying to extend his vision beyond the horizon, Jamie’s sightlines stay firmly in the visible world, to what is in front of her. And it is thus in Jamie’s imagining of the natural world—a world far more physically remote than Walden—that we feel the most connected to it rather than apart from or above it.
tanekaberi's review against another edition
4.0
So much Scotland. So much that is worlds away from my mid-Atlantic USA world. The parts about St. Kilda and the whales were the most gripping but all the parts were excellent.
toad_maiden's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
A slim and slightly melancholy book.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal death
Minor: Cancer, Death, Death of parent, and Excrement
alldebooks's review against another edition
5.0
This is exceptional writing that really takes you on the adventure with her. The chapter on St Kilda was hypnotic. At some points you forget you are reading the words and instead you are living the experience she is describing.
As a poet you, would expect a master of language but Kathleen Jamie goes beyond that. Her command of the written word flows so easily it is an absolute delight.
I can't recommend her highly enough and look forward to reading more of her work.
As a poet you, would expect a master of language but Kathleen Jamie goes beyond that. Her command of the written word flows so easily it is an absolute delight.
I can't recommend her highly enough and look forward to reading more of her work.
clairewords's review against another edition
4.0
The second volume of essays by Kathleen Jamie that I've read, more encounters with birds on lonely, wind-windswept islands that have long been abandoned by humans, though traces remain of their earlier occupation.
In her trademark poetic style, she travels with experts from whom she gleans bits of information, fascinating trivia, or alarming statistics that tell of a significant drop in population of certain species, but mostly she continues her mission of acute observation, of trying to see in the simplest terms something of the lives and patterns of behaviour of these majestical winged creatures (The Gannetry), who make those long migrations each year and return to these islands to continue their heritage.
We learn more of her beginnings, of the archeological dig, where she developed a fascination for uncovering secrets hidden beneath (The Woman in the Field), we accompany her on a boat to the arctic(Aurora), to witness giant icebergs on the move, the green lights of the aurora overhead, a visit to a museum in Norway where ancient whalebones will be cleaned, restored, preserved, the sadness of their demise emitting an odour even after all these years of inhabiting a dusty dry interior (The Hvalsalen).
She muses on Pathologies in a science lab, a lunar eclipse, three attempts to visit St Kilda, Neolithic caves and the passage of time in her own life, marked by the growth of children into adolescence on the cusp of young adulthood.
In her trademark poetic style, she travels with experts from whom she gleans bits of information, fascinating trivia, or alarming statistics that tell of a significant drop in population of certain species, but mostly she continues her mission of acute observation, of trying to see in the simplest terms something of the lives and patterns of behaviour of these majestical winged creatures (The Gannetry), who make those long migrations each year and return to these islands to continue their heritage.
We learn more of her beginnings, of the archeological dig, where she developed a fascination for uncovering secrets hidden beneath (The Woman in the Field), we accompany her on a boat to the arctic(Aurora), to witness giant icebergs on the move, the green lights of the aurora overhead, a visit to a museum in Norway where ancient whalebones will be cleaned, restored, preserved, the sadness of their demise emitting an odour even after all these years of inhabiting a dusty dry interior (The Hvalsalen).
She muses on Pathologies in a science lab, a lunar eclipse, three attempts to visit St Kilda, Neolithic caves and the passage of time in her own life, marked by the growth of children into adolescence on the cusp of young adulthood.