JAMIE, Kathleen

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Nationality: Scottish. Born: Johnston, Renfrewshire, 13 May 1962. Education: University of Edinburgh, M.A. (honors) in philosophy. Career: Writer-in-residence, Midlothian District Libraries, 1987–89, Dundee University, 1990–93, and University of Western Ontario, 1995–96. Since 1996 lecturer in creative writing, University of St. Andrews. Fellow, Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, 1989. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1980; Scottish Arts Council bursary, 1985, 1997; K. Blundell Trust Fund grant, 1989; Compton Fund grant, 1989; Somerset Maugham award, 1995; G. Faber memorial award, 1996; Paul Hamlyn Foundation award, 1997. Agent: David Fletcher Associates, 58 John Street. Penicuik, Midlothian, Scotland. Address: 217 High Street, Newburgh, Fife KY 14 6DY, Scotland.

Publications

Poetry

Black Spiders. Edinburgh, Salamander Press, 1982.

A Flame in Your Heart, with Andrew Greig. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1986.

The Way We Live. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1987.

The Autonomous Region: Poems & Photographs from Tibet. New-castle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1993.

The Queen of Sheba. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1994.

Jizzen. London, Picador, 1999.

Plays

Radio plays: Rumours of Guns, with Andrew Greig, 1985; The Whitsun Weddings, 1999.

Other

The Golden Peak: Travels in Northern Pakistan. New Delhi, Penguin, 1992.

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Manuscript Collections: University College, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia; National Library of Scotland.

Critical Study: In Poetry Review, 84 (1), spring 1994.

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Kathleen Jamie's first verse collection, Black Spiders, was published when she was only twenty years old. It shows an impressive confidence in the handling of both lyric and narrative pieces. The love poem "November" typifies the book's boldness, shifting the focus from an unsettled lover longing to be abroad—"He can touch me with a look /As thoughtless as afternoon /And think as much of hindering me /As he would of sailing away"—to the statement "… I am left to tell him in a voice that /Seems as casual as his thought of travel: /I think as much of leaving as /Of forcing him to stay." The combination of clarity and ambiguity is a persistent strength in Jamie's work. So is the cryptic economy of the title poem, whose three brief section imply both conflict and attraction between a man and a woman in an Aegean setting of sea, rocks, and a ruined convent, closing on a note at once erotic and sinister:

She caught sight of him later, below, brushing salt from the hair of his nipples. She wanted them to tickle; black spiders on her lips.

The book is dominated by estrangement, whether in travel pieces such as "Women in Jerusalem," which tackles problems of identity through a meeting of cultures, or in the big house narrative "The Barometer," or in "Permanent Cabaret," where circus performers signal their identities via costumes. As a whole, Black Spiders marks a talent on the verge of discovering its purpose.

Jamie's second book, A Flame in Your Heart, was written in collaboration with her fellow Scots poet Andrew Greig. Originally broadcast on the radio, it tells by means of monologues and linking passages the story of a love affair between Len, a Spitfire pilot, and Katie, a nurse, during the Battle of Britain in the spring and summer of 1940. While the subject seems ripe for mawkishness and ventriloquism, Jamie seizes the chance to create a character. Katie is by turns passionate, ironical, observant, and humorous; a young woman whose appetite for life is sharpened by the circumstances of war, only to be denied by Len's death in combat.

In "Karakoram Highway," the central section of Jamie's 1987 collection The Way We Live, the author instructs herself—"Stop thinking now, and put on your shoes"—as a plane prepares to land. "Karakoram Highway" is a sequence in the present tense, resisting the temptation to dwell on and interpret landscape and people. Fittingly, the poem breaks off halfway across a rope bridge. It clarifies a tension in Jamie's work between interpretation and experience, which is in fact more satisfyingly handled elsewhere in the book. "Peter the Rock" is a debate between a climber who insists that "there is nothing /but rock and the climbing of rock under the sun" and the authorial voice's equally forceful pursuit of meaning, while "Bosegran" finds that "'"why?' is just salt blown in the mind's eye. /The sea delights. The sun climbs higher as the world goes about." Drawn to consider a resolution of the debate in religious experience, Jamie responds with "Julian of Norwich," a monologue at once wry and exultant by an anchoress longing for the restoration of mystical insight: "Everything I do I do for you. /Brute. You inform the dark /inside of stones, the winds draughting in //from this world and that to come, /but never touch me. //… //(And yet, and yet, I am suspended /in his joy, huge and helpless /as the harvest moon in a summer sky.)" The title poem ends the book on a note of determined celebration: "Pass the tambourine: let me bash out praises," whose subjects must include "misery and elation, mixed, /the sod and caprice of landlords /… the way it fits, the way it is, the way it seems /to be …"

Jamie's work betrays only marginal influences, Sylvia Plath to begin with and, perhaps from time to time, Elizabeth Bishop. To an unusual degree her work seems to be made from the quick of experience, her poetry seeming almost more of a mode of inquiry than an end in itself. Yet her writings are the product of a sophisticated dramatic imagination and an increasing formal assurance. She is undoubtedly one of the most intriguing poets of her generation.

—Sean O'Brien