A review by angelayoung
Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

5.0

The sea was calm. No one else was on the beach, only some birds and two seals watching me from a few yards out on the water. I stood at the water's edge and sang the seals a song about time and change, and the seals, out of courtesy, listened.

This comes at the end of Links of Notland 1 from Kathleen Jamie's Surfacing. She's been taking part in an architectural dig that revealed Neolithic dwellings and Viking dwellings and much more besides. But because Jamie is a poet, when she writes prose she writes poetically. What better way to sum up the times and existences revealed from the digs at Links of Noltland (which, roughly translated, means: The Sandy Dunes of the Land of the Cattle) than with a song about time and change sung, flung perhaps, out towards the seas across which these peoples first travelled?

To read about far-flung places in the middle of one of the world's largest metropoles (there are pieces from the West Highlands of Scotland, eastern Scotland, the Orkneys: the suffixes ey, ay and a mean island in old Norse, as in Westray, Ronaldsay, Hoy; Alaska, Tibet and from the interior of the human mind) is to travel in the mind and to travel large, without moving, through Jamie's inspired and inspiring prose. All manner of things surface from the earth, from the mind, from conversations, from sights unfamiliar.

There are two companion volumes Sightlines and Findings, both of which were published before Surfacing; both of which I've been dipping into (all three were 2019 Christmas presents) and I'll continue to dip into because I'd like Jamie's prose to keep surfacing in my own mind.