I have cherished the essays of Kathleen Jamie for the better part of five years now, so I was very gratified to be able to review her new collection, Surfacing, for Splice — and to use the occasion to look back at her earlier volumes:

Here, then, is a typical essay by Kathleen Jamie: an off-kilter line of sight is traced and extended by speculative means, and allows for an apprehension of things that otherwise escape the eye. Sometimes, as above, the escape is spatial. A locus of interest might have a position so far above human affairs, or so far beneath, or at such a distance from them, that its very place of being evades any one person’s embodied vantage point. At other times, the escape is temporal. A locus of interest, deeply embedded in the past, makes a mockery of our immersion in the urgency of the present, so that, in effect, we are blinded by the here and now and unable to pierce the surface of the times we dwell in. In each case, though, an essay by Jamie will always find a way for the author to place herself just so in relation to her surroundings, at which point — like a key with a clean cut sliding smoothly into a lock — the author’s eyes align with some aspect of the world that radically expands the horizons of her perception. [Jamie’s first collection of essays] was blurbed by Richard Mabey, while [her second] was blurbed by John Berger, and Jamie’s work often comes across as a synthesis of theirs.