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Surfacing
In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.
256 pages, Paperback
First published September 24, 2019
154 people are currently reading
3747 people want to read
About the author
Kathleen Jamie
71 books323 followersKathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and travel writer, one of a remarkable clutch of Scottish writers picked out in 1994 as the ‘new generation poets’ – it was a marketing ploy at the time but turns out to have been a very prescient selection. She became Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling in 2011.
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 220 reviews
June 17, 2020
Kathleen Jamie's previous two essay collections Findings and Sightlines were wonderful, luminous books that mixed landscape and nature writing with memoir to produce something very personal, and this one is to a degree more of the same. The difference is that apart from three long pieces, the essays in this one are very short, sometimes only two or three pages long.
The long pieces left the strongest impression, and all three relate trips.
In Quihagak relates an archaeological visit to North-East Alaska, where the Yu'pik people try to maintain elements of their distinct lifestyles against modern pressures - the site they are investigated is a few centuries old but remarkably well preserved by ice.
Links of Noltland relates a recent summer that Jamie spent with another archaeological dig, this time investigating a neolithic village on the Orkney island of Westray, which was discovered due to erosion of the sand dunes which had been covering and preserving it.
The Wind Horse is based on her diaries from a much earlier trip she made as a recent graduate, to a province of China near Tibet and a village with a largely Tibetan populations at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests, which put Tibet itself off-limits to Westerners.
This is another fine collection.
The long pieces left the strongest impression, and all three relate trips.
In Quihagak relates an archaeological visit to North-East Alaska, where the Yu'pik people try to maintain elements of their distinct lifestyles against modern pressures - the site they are investigated is a few centuries old but remarkably well preserved by ice.
Links of Noltland relates a recent summer that Jamie spent with another archaeological dig, this time investigating a neolithic village on the Orkney island of Westray, which was discovered due to erosion of the sand dunes which had been covering and preserving it.
The Wind Horse is based on her diaries from a much earlier trip she made as a recent graduate, to a province of China near Tibet and a village with a largely Tibetan populations at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests, which put Tibet itself off-limits to Westerners.
This is another fine collection.
July 10, 2024
I really enjoyed this book. It was beautifully written, inquisitive, close to nature, inspirational, and thought provoking in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. And she is a wonderful story teller bringing the moment alive. Her eye and ear for details brings new dimensions and made me feel as if I were present experiencing the same by her side.
When I first read the description of the book as essays I didn’t expect this. When I think of essays what came to mind was what we had to write in jr high and. high school English or any other classes. But this was not that. Much of the book was made of up memoirs, archeology excavations and travel tales, and time in nature. They were stories about people and place. There was a lovely prose poem. There were a couple of short pieces that were exquisite; her simplicity added to their wonder. Some of her topics were of the earliest people and animals. And these themes showed up elsewhere too. We were always made aware of the birds passing by and often the vastness of views and skies and the currents of the wind or it’s blowing.
Surfacing was the theme. What is surfacing? What is being made known? All the pieces Kathleen Jamie shared with us were about things that surfaced. Like a dream she had. Like the decimation of Tibet as it was happening. Like the people she met and events that occurred that changed things subtlety or greatly in nature, the way people lived, and the way of life and how communities adapted. There were ghost threads. I felt the sounds of nature resonating around me often. Heard the sounds of Tibetan monks chanting come alive in one memoir. And the exactness of her words brought up experiences I had forgotten I had with Tibetan chanting too. She offered an understanding of the breath of life today and of times now gone. And yes about climate change and the tundra. And the ice age. And Scottish mining. Or how under thin layers of sand on an Iron Age archeological sites were found Neolithic building and logos of that time. We met the changing natures of people and the land and items used in daily life. Kathleen’s offering were deeply interconnected; as is life surfacing for a moment or ages.
Nature keeps changing. People and animals have come and gone. Old Cities and homesteads were hidden and reasons why still unknown. People and cultures like Tibet are being changed now in present time. The culture once was secluded and now globally known and its peaceful ways gone outside its borders.
A question was asked of Chinese art students seeking to live peacefully and offer drawings of flowers - “Are you a student or worker.” We have Mao’s and Marxist philosophy surfacing too. 3 Czech visitors to a Chinese Tibet border town have 2 choices for travel: Russia and China. Since the story took place a new way has surfaced for the Czech people. The Chinese students protested. The changes they asked for at Tiananmen Square surfaced were brutally squashed. All of this is part of Surfacing. The ways of nature and humans in power. Somethings bloom, some fade away, some remnants sometimes are found again and sometimes earthed over again.
When I went into this book the harm of climate change is being loudly aired. Here there is a breadth of the timeliness of conditions coming and going. And the so many unknowns and amazing things about them. I feel after reading this book we are now in a natural rhythm of nature. It’s not to say we can’t do things still to ebb some of the devastation. But the how we do it is the question at hand. Do we create a war or find a way to adapt that is more peaceful and embraces the vastness of nature at our core? Have we surfaced from the dream of avoiding and or harming?
I thought this a very meaningful book of our times. And am grateful to GR folk who reviewed it. Their reviews piqued my curiosity. And am grateful to Kathleen Jamie for her offering this lovely piece of writing for our times.
PS: I did have a favorite story in the book. It was about the Yup’ik people who live close to the northern edge of Alaska by the Bering Sea. The tundra is wearing away and they found a 500 year old village under it. In the summer they are excavating it. I fell in love with the culture and the people and how they are adapting the old ways with some modernism yet keep their culture and way of life alive. And also call it back after years of discrimination that wanted to destroy it. I had worked briefly at a couple of digs in my early twenties and they weren’t as incredible as Yup’ik tundra find or Orkney Neolithic find (both I would love to see). Her telling us about them brought back the work and comradely created and the joy and wonder when things were found. And the hard work. At the Yup’ik site there was a joy to the excavation and it was deeply meaningful to the tribe. I keep coming back to this story. There is so so much yet to learn from their way of life.
There was a piece about the soaring in the thermals of buzzards (in CA we call them turkey vultures) and eagles. I used to go to retreat center at a deer park and often sit on the teeny deck and watch the vultures soar. Ugly looking birds but their soaring was glorious. And so was Kathleen’s recollection in this piece. She often captures the wonder of people, animals and nature’s ways. And her writing has an innate wisdom in it. See depicts details that make things come vitally alive and she also embraces it in the large picture to see how things interconnect.
~~~
When I first read the description of the book as essays I didn’t expect this. When I think of essays what came to mind was what we had to write in jr high and. high school English or any other classes. But this was not that. Much of the book was made of up memoirs, archeology excavations and travel tales, and time in nature. They were stories about people and place. There was a lovely prose poem. There were a couple of short pieces that were exquisite; her simplicity added to their wonder. Some of her topics were of the earliest people and animals. And these themes showed up elsewhere too. We were always made aware of the birds passing by and often the vastness of views and skies and the currents of the wind or it’s blowing.
Surfacing was the theme. What is surfacing? What is being made known? All the pieces Kathleen Jamie shared with us were about things that surfaced. Like a dream she had. Like the decimation of Tibet as it was happening. Like the people she met and events that occurred that changed things subtlety or greatly in nature, the way people lived, and the way of life and how communities adapted. There were ghost threads. I felt the sounds of nature resonating around me often. Heard the sounds of Tibetan monks chanting come alive in one memoir. And the exactness of her words brought up experiences I had forgotten I had with Tibetan chanting too. She offered an understanding of the breath of life today and of times now gone. And yes about climate change and the tundra. And the ice age. And Scottish mining. Or how under thin layers of sand on an Iron Age archeological sites were found Neolithic building and logos of that time. We met the changing natures of people and the land and items used in daily life. Kathleen’s offering were deeply interconnected; as is life surfacing for a moment or ages.
Nature keeps changing. People and animals have come and gone. Old Cities and homesteads were hidden and reasons why still unknown. People and cultures like Tibet are being changed now in present time. The culture once was secluded and now globally known and its peaceful ways gone outside its borders.
A question was asked of Chinese art students seeking to live peacefully and offer drawings of flowers - “Are you a student or worker.” We have Mao’s and Marxist philosophy surfacing too. 3 Czech visitors to a Chinese Tibet border town have 2 choices for travel: Russia and China. Since the story took place a new way has surfaced for the Czech people. The Chinese students protested. The changes they asked for at Tiananmen Square surfaced were brutally squashed. All of this is part of Surfacing. The ways of nature and humans in power. Somethings bloom, some fade away, some remnants sometimes are found again and sometimes earthed over again.
When I went into this book the harm of climate change is being loudly aired. Here there is a breadth of the timeliness of conditions coming and going. And the so many unknowns and amazing things about them. I feel after reading this book we are now in a natural rhythm of nature. It’s not to say we can’t do things still to ebb some of the devastation. But the how we do it is the question at hand. Do we create a war or find a way to adapt that is more peaceful and embraces the vastness of nature at our core? Have we surfaced from the dream of avoiding and or harming?
I thought this a very meaningful book of our times. And am grateful to GR folk who reviewed it. Their reviews piqued my curiosity. And am grateful to Kathleen Jamie for her offering this lovely piece of writing for our times.
PS: I did have a favorite story in the book. It was about the Yup’ik people who live close to the northern edge of Alaska by the Bering Sea. The tundra is wearing away and they found a 500 year old village under it. In the summer they are excavating it. I fell in love with the culture and the people and how they are adapting the old ways with some modernism yet keep their culture and way of life alive. And also call it back after years of discrimination that wanted to destroy it. I had worked briefly at a couple of digs in my early twenties and they weren’t as incredible as Yup’ik tundra find or Orkney Neolithic find (both I would love to see). Her telling us about them brought back the work and comradely created and the joy and wonder when things were found. And the hard work. At the Yup’ik site there was a joy to the excavation and it was deeply meaningful to the tribe. I keep coming back to this story. There is so so much yet to learn from their way of life.
There was a piece about the soaring in the thermals of buzzards (in CA we call them turkey vultures) and eagles. I used to go to retreat center at a deer park and often sit on the teeny deck and watch the vultures soar. Ugly looking birds but their soaring was glorious. And so was Kathleen’s recollection in this piece. She often captures the wonder of people, animals and nature’s ways. And her writing has an innate wisdom in it. See depicts details that make things come vitally alive and she also embraces it in the large picture to see how things interconnect.
~~~
June 8, 2020
I’m a big fan of Kathleen Jamie’s work, prose and poetry. Like her two previous essay collections, Sightlines and Findings, both of which I read in 2012, this fuses autobiography with nature and travel writing – two genres that are too often dominated by males. Jamie has a particular interest in birds, islands, archaeology and the oddities of the human body, all subjects that intrigue me, too.
The bulk of Surfacing is given over to three long pieces set in Alaska, Orkney and Tibet. She was drawn to Quinhagak, Alaska, a village that’s about the farthest you can go before crossing the Bering Sea into Russia, by her fascination with the whaling artifacts found along the UK’s east coast. Here she helped out on a summer archaeological dig and learned about the language and culture of the Yup’ik people. Alarmingly, the ground here should have been frozen most of the way to the surface, forcing the crew to wear thermals; instead, the ice was a half-meter down, and Jamie found that she never needed her cold-weather gear.
On Westray, Orkney (hey, I’ve been there!), there was also evidence of environmental degradation in the form of rapid erosion. This Neolithic site, comparable to the better-known Skara Brae, leads Jamie to think about deep time and whether we’re actually much better off:
Prehistory fits the zeitgeist, as seen in two entries from the recent Wainwright Prize shortlist: Time Song by Julia Blackburn and Underland by Robert Macfarlane. It’s a necessary corrective to the kind of short-term thinking that has gotten us into environmental crisis.
A cancer biopsy coincides with a dream memory of being bitten by a Tibetan dog, prompting Jamie to get out her notebook from a trip to China/Tibet some 30 years ago. Xiahe was technically in China but ethnically and culturally Tibetan, and so the best they could manage at that time since Tibet was closed to foreigners. There’s an amazing amount of detail in this essay given how much time has passed, but her photos as well as her notebook must have helped with the reconstruction.
The depth and engagement of the long essays are admirable, yet I often connected more with the very short pieces on experiencing a cave, spotting an eagle or getting lost in a forest. Jamie has made the interesting choice of delivering a lot of the memoir fragments in the second person. My favorite piece of all is “Elders,” which in just five pages charts her father’s decline and death and marks her own passage into unknown territory: grown children and no parents. What will her life look like now? There is beautiful nature writing to be found in this volume, as you might expect, but also relatable words on the human condition:
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
The bulk of Surfacing is given over to three long pieces set in Alaska, Orkney and Tibet. She was drawn to Quinhagak, Alaska, a village that’s about the farthest you can go before crossing the Bering Sea into Russia, by her fascination with the whaling artifacts found along the UK’s east coast. Here she helped out on a summer archaeological dig and learned about the language and culture of the Yup’ik people. Alarmingly, the ground here should have been frozen most of the way to the surface, forcing the crew to wear thermals; instead, the ice was a half-meter down, and Jamie found that she never needed her cold-weather gear.
On Westray, Orkney (hey, I’ve been there!), there was also evidence of environmental degradation in the form of rapid erosion. This Neolithic site, comparable to the better-known Skara Brae, leads Jamie to think about deep time and whether we’re actually much better off:
Being on site often left me freighted with thoughts about time, how it seems to expand and contract. I kept having to remind myself of the ages that passed during what we call the Neolithic or the Bronze Age. How those people’s days were as long and vital as ours. … We all know it. We can’t go on like this, but we wouldn’t go back either, to the stone ploughshare and the early death.
Prehistory fits the zeitgeist, as seen in two entries from the recent Wainwright Prize shortlist: Time Song by Julia Blackburn and Underland by Robert Macfarlane. It’s a necessary corrective to the kind of short-term thinking that has gotten us into environmental crisis.
A cancer biopsy coincides with a dream memory of being bitten by a Tibetan dog, prompting Jamie to get out her notebook from a trip to China/Tibet some 30 years ago. Xiahe was technically in China but ethnically and culturally Tibetan, and so the best they could manage at that time since Tibet was closed to foreigners. There’s an amazing amount of detail in this essay given how much time has passed, but her photos as well as her notebook must have helped with the reconstruction.
The depth and engagement of the long essays are admirable, yet I often connected more with the very short pieces on experiencing a cave, spotting an eagle or getting lost in a forest. Jamie has made the interesting choice of delivering a lot of the memoir fragments in the second person. My favorite piece of all is “Elders,” which in just five pages charts her father’s decline and death and marks her own passage into unknown territory: grown children and no parents. What will her life look like now? There is beautiful nature writing to be found in this volume, as you might expect, but also relatable words on the human condition:
What are you doing here anyway, in the woods? … You wanted to think about all the horror. The everyday news … No, not to think about it exactly but consider what to do with the weight of it all, the knowing … You are not lost, just melodramatic. The path is at your feet, see? Now carry on.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
September 10, 2019
Life feels like one headlong rush at times. The phone squeaks constantly with notifications, demanding attention now, the 24 hour news fills our lives with politics and despair and yet time goes no faster than it did 5000 years ago. It grinds ceaselessly on, covering memories and objects with its gossamer-thin seconds. To go back in time, we need to unearth our landscapes and memories.
Time is a spiral. What goes around comes around.
The book opens with her in Alaska helping at an archaeological dig in a Yup’ik village. The site is normally frozen most of the year, but in the summer the cold relents, normally allowing the top four or five inches to be uncovered, however, climate change means that the permafrost is thawing to a depth of half a metre allowing more secrets of its hunter-gatherer past to be revealed. The objects that they are finding are enabling the village to re-discover their past. They found dance masks that were discarded after missionaries told them it was devil worship and for the first time in a very long time performed a dance that was pieced together from the elder’s memories.
The landscape was astonishing. There was nothing I wanted to do more than sit quietly and look at it, come to terms with its vastness.
Her next excursion to the past is at the Links of Noltland, up in Orkney. This Neolithic site has been covered by dunes and what they have found here was last seen by human eyes thousands of years ago. The need to excavate and understand just what is there, is urgent as it is subject to erosion from the storms that the Atlantic brings, as well as the other pressure of funding to carry out the work being stopped because of budget pressures. These people were only a step away from the wild and had short brutal lives and yet they were skilled enough to have devised a method when they built their homes to keep out the relentless wind.
They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again.
Jamie writes of time spent in Xiahe in Tibet in her younger days, at the time of the student protests and the clampdown of martial law in the region and the palpable tension in the area. They explore as much as they can, but because they are foreigners, they have an undue amount of attention directed towards them, including the inevitable night raid by the police. There are other essays in here too, almost short interludes between the longer pieces. She stops her car to watch the mastery an eagle has over the air and consider the timelessness of a woodland. Some of the essays are more personal too, she recalls the moment of her fathers passing and struggles to hear her mother and grandmothers voices in her mind.
A new Kathleen Jamie book is a thing of joy, and Surfacing does not disappoint at all. Her wonderful writing is layered, building images of the things that she sees, until you the reader, feel immersed in the same place that she inhabited. Some of the essays are very moving, Elders in particular, but also The Wind Horse where you sense the tension in the town from what she observes. Her skill as a poet means, for me at least, that her writing has a way of helping you seen the world around in a new and different light, revealing as much from the shadows as from the obvious and this book is no different.
Time is a spiral. What goes around comes around.
The book opens with her in Alaska helping at an archaeological dig in a Yup’ik village. The site is normally frozen most of the year, but in the summer the cold relents, normally allowing the top four or five inches to be uncovered, however, climate change means that the permafrost is thawing to a depth of half a metre allowing more secrets of its hunter-gatherer past to be revealed. The objects that they are finding are enabling the village to re-discover their past. They found dance masks that were discarded after missionaries told them it was devil worship and for the first time in a very long time performed a dance that was pieced together from the elder’s memories.
The landscape was astonishing. There was nothing I wanted to do more than sit quietly and look at it, come to terms with its vastness.
Her next excursion to the past is at the Links of Noltland, up in Orkney. This Neolithic site has been covered by dunes and what they have found here was last seen by human eyes thousands of years ago. The need to excavate and understand just what is there, is urgent as it is subject to erosion from the storms that the Atlantic brings, as well as the other pressure of funding to carry out the work being stopped because of budget pressures. These people were only a step away from the wild and had short brutal lives and yet they were skilled enough to have devised a method when they built their homes to keep out the relentless wind.
They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again.
Jamie writes of time spent in Xiahe in Tibet in her younger days, at the time of the student protests and the clampdown of martial law in the region and the palpable tension in the area. They explore as much as they can, but because they are foreigners, they have an undue amount of attention directed towards them, including the inevitable night raid by the police. There are other essays in here too, almost short interludes between the longer pieces. She stops her car to watch the mastery an eagle has over the air and consider the timelessness of a woodland. Some of the essays are more personal too, she recalls the moment of her fathers passing and struggles to hear her mother and grandmothers voices in her mind.
A new Kathleen Jamie book is a thing of joy, and Surfacing does not disappoint at all. Her wonderful writing is layered, building images of the things that she sees, until you the reader, feel immersed in the same place that she inhabited. Some of the essays are very moving, Elders in particular, but also The Wind Horse where you sense the tension in the town from what she observes. Her skill as a poet means, for me at least, that her writing has a way of helping you seen the world around in a new and different light, revealing as much from the shadows as from the obvious and this book is no different.
April 19, 2022
Well written, but unremarkable. Rather boring, actually, with the simple recounting of memories without any substantial contemplation or discussion.
June 8, 2021
First of all, I’m a bit of a Kathleen Jamie fan. I’ve read Findings and Sightlines and really enjoyed both of them. And I’ve been looking forward to reading Surfacing (to be honest, I’m not quite sure why it has taken me until 18 months after publication to get to it).
Surfacing is both like the previous two books and different from them. It’s a collection of essays, it contains some wonderful writing about events in Jamie’s life, about nature, about our place in the natural world. So far, so “normal”. But somehow this time it is more. You don’t really realise this until towards the end, but there’s almost an overall arc to the book where thoughts and ideas feed subsequent essays allowing the book to gradually build in impact.
Structurally, the book consists of 12 essays, one split into three distinct parts (more on this in a minute). The two longest, by far, describe two archeological digs that Jamie attended. Clearly, the topic of “surfacing” plays directly into these chapters as artefacts from hundreds, thousands, of years ago are brought to the surface. These essays also, to my mind, focus on erosion both physical and cultural. But the other essays also play their part in the idea of “surfacing” as Jamie mines her memories, sometimes subconsciously, and brings thoughts and ideas to the surface.
Also structurally, the book seems to hinge around Part III of the long essay about a dig in Orkney. This final section of the essay pushes the boundaries of a non-fiction book as, using the second person, it imagines life 5000 years ago for earlier residents of the community now being brought to the surface. This shift in tone and style seems to open the way for the rest of the book to focus on far more personal things including Jamie’s cancer diagnosis and the death of her father.
In some ways, this is a sneaky book. It gently ambushes you.
Surfacing is both like the previous two books and different from them. It’s a collection of essays, it contains some wonderful writing about events in Jamie’s life, about nature, about our place in the natural world. So far, so “normal”. But somehow this time it is more. You don’t really realise this until towards the end, but there’s almost an overall arc to the book where thoughts and ideas feed subsequent essays allowing the book to gradually build in impact.
Structurally, the book consists of 12 essays, one split into three distinct parts (more on this in a minute). The two longest, by far, describe two archeological digs that Jamie attended. Clearly, the topic of “surfacing” plays directly into these chapters as artefacts from hundreds, thousands, of years ago are brought to the surface. These essays also, to my mind, focus on erosion both physical and cultural. But the other essays also play their part in the idea of “surfacing” as Jamie mines her memories, sometimes subconsciously, and brings thoughts and ideas to the surface.
Also structurally, the book seems to hinge around Part III of the long essay about a dig in Orkney. This final section of the essay pushes the boundaries of a non-fiction book as, using the second person, it imagines life 5000 years ago for earlier residents of the community now being brought to the surface. This shift in tone and style seems to open the way for the rest of the book to focus on far more personal things including Jamie’s cancer diagnosis and the death of her father.
In some ways, this is a sneaky book. It gently ambushes you.
April 9, 2020
In her first book of essays Findings, she talks about her attempts to observe better, to stop naming things, to really see. She wants to move away from labelling and identifying, towards painting a picture with words.
Surfacing is her third collection and it’s brilliant, practiced in the art of observation she takes us with her on a voyage, helps us see with the eye of a naturalist, sharing her experience with respect for the environment, acknowledging the privilege.
The Reindeer Cave
In the first essay, written in the second person ‘You‘, the author has hiked up a glen to the cave, thinking about the Ice Age and the preciousness of life, as she observes six red deer on the hillside opposite, equally startled no doubt.
Deep within the hillside, in the passage of an underground stream, the bones of a bear were found by cave-divers. Carbon dated, they were found to be forty-five thousand years old.
At the cave mouth she wonders whether the ice will ever return, a natural cycle, or if we’re too far gone with our Anthropocene.
Next to the last page is a black and white photograph of a valley, mist in the distance; as I look closely I see something appear out of the mist. This is a book you must read the printed version, or you will miss the apparition.
A Reflection
The second essay begins as Jamie is taking a train north (in Scotland), sitting on the landward side she watches wintry fields pass by, passengers on the opposite side have a sea view. Drifting in and out of daydreaming she notices the sea superimposed over fields of brown earth. Then disappear.
She continues to Aberdeen and visits a museum. Interested in Arctic artefacts, it is at the Aberdeen University museum she first hears about archaeologist Rick Knecht and his work in Alaska, the subject of the next essay.
In Quinhagak
Jamie takes a six-seater plane from a small airport in Alaska, where pilots enter the waiting area, call out the name of their village then lead passengers across the tarmac. Nervous because the name is so unfamiliar, she hears the call for Quinhagak and follows two other passengers behind the pilot to the plane.
The pilot had long red hair tied in a loose bun with a biro stuck through it. In the plane she readied herself, then half turned in her seat.
The village is the home of the Yup’ik, indigenous people of the circumpolar north; an archaeological site Nunallaq (meaning old village) sits at the edge of the tundra, a couple of miles away near the beach. As the sea erodes the land, it is slowly revealing the 500 year old village and its cultural heritage, its resilience.
The dig is in it’s fifth season, at the end of every season all the finds are air freighted to Aberdeen to be cleaned, preserved and catalogued.
The dig is revitalising traditional skills that had been lost, local people interested in the items found are beginning to make replicas, relearning old techniques.
They are people who have learned to adapt. Their houses stand on stilts due to thawing of permafrost. Nothing can be buried. Any warm structure on the ground would cause the ground to melt and heave, collapsing the structure.
Between walks with her binoculars and helping out at the dig, sometimes facing seaward, other times landward, she observes life. At the end of each day people gather at the shed to view the days finds; on the last day of the season there will be a grand ‘show and tell’.
Near the end of her stay, she is invited to a birthday party with a couple of others. They arrive, there are introductions, they gave their names.
As we did so, Sarah looked at us from head to toe appraisingly, and then bestowed on each of us a Yup’ik name several syllables long. It seemed to delight her, matching us to these names by I don’t know what qualities.
Later when they are introduced to one particular elder with their new Yup’ik names, the mention of those lost people affects the old lady deeply, she hugs them each warmly.
Links of Noltland I, II, III
The second lengthy essay finds the author at another dig, one whose archaeology has been buried for five thousand years on the island of Orkney.
It is a Neothilic and Bronze Age settlement site that has been in operation for a number of years and could go on for many more, if they had the surety of funding. They do not.
There is not just the work on site, but a Victorian building stacked with their findings, she visits and is shown beads bones and stones and imagines who those people were.
The most famous find, discovered in 2009 is kept in the Heritage centre, where they have a small section, most of the centre given over to the more recent Viking finds.
Jamie asks about local interest in their ancient dig and is surprised by the response.
Some years ago the team found cows' skulls set into the walls of one of the buildings they'd excavated, a complete ring of cattle skulls, all placed upside down with the horns facing into the room. The wall had been built up over them, no longer visible, but presumably their presence had been felt by whoever built it.
There are other sites over Europe where cattle skulls have been found and often a rush to come to conclusions, resulting in dramatic headlines of massacre or sacrifice, but this team have a different take on it, believing them to have had symbolic or aesthetic significance.
She goes to meet a couple who are organic cattle farmers, it seems like the only living link to the Neolithic people. They moved onto the farm one day and ploughed up the ryegrass the next, to plant a species-rich herbal lay, with thirty varieties of grass, which has seen a great increase in insects and wormcasts. They now have a herd of twenty-three milking cows. With names. And personalities. And a bull named Eric.
The couple make an artisan cheese in the style of alpine French cheeses called 'Westray Wife' a little picture of the Neolithic figurine features on their labels.
In the second part of the essay she returns for the end of the season, the closing of the site and in the third part she writes the story of the Neolithic people, the culmination of observation and imagination.
Surfacing
Although 'Surfacing'is a metaphor which aptly describes the book's theme and is appropriate for narratives about archaeological digs, it is also the title of a vignette about the author's mother and grandmother.
A Tibetan Dog
A wonderful little essay that recounts an experience with a little terrier in a Tibetan town and his return in a dream many years later, a symbol she interprets on awaking, like a message from the subconscious she immediately understood.
The Wind Horse
The final longer essay is one pulled from old notebooks and memories of her twenty-seven year old self, travelling far from home, a woman who wanted to become a writer, starting out.
It is notably different to the earlier essays, more of a travelogue, less present, more self-conscious, there's a passivity to travelling through a place without purpose. I realise what is missing.
A tall monk who wore brown robes and a topknot was staying at their hotel.
This reticence confirms for me what has become one of her strengths in the earlier long pieces. The thing that has also surfaced, Jamie's generosity and respect for those she interacts with, she gives voice to others, her observations are an amalgam of her own observations and insights and those of the many other passionate participants or locals she encounters in her meanderings.
I so enjoy and value how the essays draw you in to her experience, she achieves just the right balance of nature and humanity, of observation and interaction, of imagination and reality. Her work is like a patchwork quilt, made up of different colours and textures, bringing in all the elements that make a community, whether its 5,000 or 500 years old or from the present.
This could well be her best collection yet.
Surfacing is her third collection and it’s brilliant, practiced in the art of observation she takes us with her on a voyage, helps us see with the eye of a naturalist, sharing her experience with respect for the environment, acknowledging the privilege.
The Reindeer Cave
In the first essay, written in the second person ‘You‘, the author has hiked up a glen to the cave, thinking about the Ice Age and the preciousness of life, as she observes six red deer on the hillside opposite, equally startled no doubt.
Not half an hour ago you were walking beside the burn in a narrow ravine further up the glen. You heard something, glanced up to see a large rock bounce then plummet into the burn twenty five yards in front of you. The echo faded but your heart was still hammering as you backed away.
Deep within the hillside, in the passage of an underground stream, the bones of a bear were found by cave-divers. Carbon dated, they were found to be forty-five thousand years old.
A long sleep, even for a bear: sixteen million days and nights had passed in the upper world. Long enough for the ice to return, then yield again, then return in one last snap, then leave for good – or at least for now.
At the cave mouth she wonders whether the ice will ever return, a natural cycle, or if we’re too far gone with our Anthropocene.
Next to the last page is a black and white photograph of a valley, mist in the distance; as I look closely I see something appear out of the mist. This is a book you must read the printed version, or you will miss the apparition.
A Reflection
The second essay begins as Jamie is taking a train north (in Scotland), sitting on the landward side she watches wintry fields pass by, passengers on the opposite side have a sea view. Drifting in and out of daydreaming she notices the sea superimposed over fields of brown earth. Then disappear.
A moment later it flashed back again, a stretch of sea, silvery over the land, but only for a few seconds. By now I was sitting up, interested in this phenomenon. The fields on the left gave way to pinewoods, the train tilted a little and, yes, the sea’s reflection flashed on again, this time above the trees. If I narrowed my eyes I could see both sea and trees at once. And now there was a ship! A ghostly tanker was sailing over the pine trees.
She continues to Aberdeen and visits a museum. Interested in Arctic artefacts, it is at the Aberdeen University museum she first hears about archaeologist Rick Knecht and his work in Alaska, the subject of the next essay.
In Quinhagak
Jamie takes a six-seater plane from a small airport in Alaska, where pilots enter the waiting area, call out the name of their village then lead passengers across the tarmac. Nervous because the name is so unfamiliar, she hears the call for Quinhagak and follows two other passengers behind the pilot to the plane.
The pilot had long red hair tied in a loose bun with a biro stuck through it. In the plane she readied herself, then half turned in her seat.
‘You guys definitely going to Quinhagak? Just checking! Okay. There’s emergency supplies in the back.’
The village is the home of the Yup’ik, indigenous people of the circumpolar north; an archaeological site Nunallaq (meaning old village) sits at the edge of the tundra, a couple of miles away near the beach. As the sea erodes the land, it is slowly revealing the 500 year old village and its cultural heritage, its resilience.
The dig is in it’s fifth season, at the end of every season all the finds are air freighted to Aberdeen to be cleaned, preserved and catalogued.
At the end of the excavation, however, there would be a great return. All the thousands of artefacts would go home to the Yup’ik land where they belonged, legally and morally.
The dig is revitalising traditional skills that had been lost, local people interested in the items found are beginning to make replicas, relearning old techniques.
They are people who have learned to adapt. Their houses stand on stilts due to thawing of permafrost. Nothing can be buried. Any warm structure on the ground would cause the ground to melt and heave, collapsing the structure.
Between walks with her binoculars and helping out at the dig, sometimes facing seaward, other times landward, she observes life. At the end of each day people gather at the shed to view the days finds; on the last day of the season there will be a grand ‘show and tell’.
I noticed that people notice. George had noticed me looking. They notice the bog cotton and its passing, an influx of owls, that there are bears around. The whole place must be in constant conversation with itself, holding knowledge collectively.
Near the end of her stay, she is invited to a birthday party with a couple of others. They arrive, there are introductions, they gave their names.
As we did so, Sarah looked at us from head to toe appraisingly, and then bestowed on each of us a Yup’ik name several syllables long. It seemed to delight her, matching us to these names by I don’t know what qualities.
I understood that these names, which we now bore as well as our own, were the names of family members who had died. So it was as revenants, rather than strangers that we were welcomed into Sarah’s home.
Later when they are introduced to one particular elder with their new Yup’ik names, the mention of those lost people affects the old lady deeply, she hugs them each warmly.
Links of Noltland I, II, III
The second lengthy essay finds the author at another dig, one whose archaeology has been buried for five thousand years on the island of Orkney.
'What's happening is significant really to...well, to archaeology, but also to us, the human race.'
It is a Neothilic and Bronze Age settlement site that has been in operation for a number of years and could go on for many more, if they had the surety of funding. They do not.
'There's enough here for thirty PhDs on bone alone,' said Graeme, 'Decades worth of work.'
'If HES really pull out what will happen?'
'We'll have to look elsewhere and make all kinds of promises. We can't look to the EU anymore.'
There is not just the work on site, but a Victorian building stacked with their findings, she visits and is shown beads bones and stones and imagines who those people were.
For a moment, out of the twenty-first-century plastic boxes stacked in the gloomy Victorian store, there emerged a vision of people clothed in animal hides, bearing spiral-designed pots, with hair braided, hanging with beads, people crazy about cattle, young people prematurely old, as we would think now.
The most famous find, discovered in 2009 is kept in the Heritage centre, where they have a small section, most of the centre given over to the more recent Viking finds.
The 'Westway wife' is the earliest representation we have of a human, in the UK, and she has become a motif for the site, almost a tourist attraction, if toursits can be drawn to a sandstone figure not four centimetres high on a faraway island.
Jamie asks about local interest in their ancient dig and is surprised by the response.
'They're interested but not connected. It's only the Viking they're interested in. It's the Vikings the Orkney and Shetland islanders identify with. They're not British, not Scottish, they're Norse. Not prehistoric. Viking.'
'But the Vikings are so recent, relatively.'
'The Vikings "won",' said Hazel with a shrug.
'What do you mean the Vikings "won"?' I asked reluctantly, thinking of the ancient burial mound I could see from my window, which the Vikings had chosen to use as a fishing station.
'Just that. After the Vikings arrived, all traces of the older culture ceased. That's what the archaeology is suggesting.'
Some years ago the team found cows' skulls set into the walls of one of the buildings they'd excavated, a complete ring of cattle skulls, all placed upside down with the horns facing into the room. The wall had been built up over them, no longer visible, but presumably their presence had been felt by whoever built it.
There are other sites over Europe where cattle skulls have been found and often a rush to come to conclusions, resulting in dramatic headlines of massacre or sacrifice, but this team have a different take on it, believing them to have had symbolic or aesthetic significance.
'Remember', said Graeme, 'these animals would have had biographies. They would have been known as individuals. As personalities. Spoken about.'
'Named?'
'Maybe.'
'You think they revered their cows?'
'Worshipped!' Hazel Laughed.
She goes to meet a couple who are organic cattle farmers, it seems like the only living link to the Neolithic people. They moved onto the farm one day and ploughed up the ryegrass the next, to plant a species-rich herbal lay, with thirty varieties of grass, which has seen a great increase in insects and wormcasts. They now have a herd of twenty-three milking cows. With names. And personalities. And a bull named Eric.
'Lots of bulls here are called Eric. I think its a Viking thing.'
The couple make an artisan cheese in the style of alpine French cheeses called 'Westray Wife' a little picture of the Neolithic figurine features on their labels.
In the second part of the essay she returns for the end of the season, the closing of the site and in the third part she writes the story of the Neolithic people, the culmination of observation and imagination.
Surfacing
Although 'Surfacing'is a metaphor which aptly describes the book's theme and is appropriate for narratives about archaeological digs, it is also the title of a vignette about the author's mother and grandmother.
Your losing their voices. When did that happen? You're forgetting the sound of your mother's voice,and your grandmother's. They died within eighteen months of each other a decade ago and today you realise you can't quite bring their voices to mind.
A Tibetan Dog
A wonderful little essay that recounts an experience with a little terrier in a Tibetan town and his return in a dream many years later, a symbol she interprets on awaking, like a message from the subconscious she immediately understood.
The Wind Horse
The final longer essay is one pulled from old notebooks and memories of her twenty-seven year old self, travelling far from home, a woman who wanted to become a writer, starting out.
It is notably different to the earlier essays, more of a travelogue, less present, more self-conscious, there's a passivity to travelling through a place without purpose. I realise what is missing.
I could look and smile, but what did I learn of their lives, the prostrating Tibetan pilgrims, the stallholder deftly working an abacus, the ice-cream girl with her barrow, who sat with her chin in her hands when business was slack? Nothing at all.
A tall monk who wore brown robes and a topknot was staying at their hotel.
He may have been a Taoist, he may have been Japanese, I don't know, and I regret that I didn't try to speak to him.
This reticence confirms for me what has become one of her strengths in the earlier long pieces. The thing that has also surfaced, Jamie's generosity and respect for those she interacts with, she gives voice to others, her observations are an amalgam of her own observations and insights and those of the many other passionate participants or locals she encounters in her meanderings.
I so enjoy and value how the essays draw you in to her experience, she achieves just the right balance of nature and humanity, of observation and interaction, of imagination and reality. Her work is like a patchwork quilt, made up of different colours and textures, bringing in all the elements that make a community, whether its 5,000 or 500 years old or from the present.
This could well be her best collection yet.
August 16, 2020
Kathleen Jamie is one of my favourite writers, she has the ability to capture the magic out of the smallest thing and come up with beautiful words to describe it. In Surfacing she is removing a layer to see what is underneath, archaeological digs in Alaska and on the isle of Westray revealing human history, losing a parent, kids moving out and searching for what that means for her.
There are 3 big essay's here, two of them are the digs and the third is about time spent in Xiahe in Tibet when China shut the borders down and the students rose in protest. All three of them draw you in and it feels as if you are there, you sense the cold in Alaska, the wind of the Orkneys and the quiet of the monastery at Xiahe. Mixed in between are some short pieces, observations of things around us that we would normally miss, driving along and seeing an eagle and getting lost in the moment watching it glide effortlessly without beating it's wings.
A couple of favourite chapters of mine were the 3rd part of Links of Noltland, thinking of the people who lived there 5000 years ago and asking them question after question about their lives. Then there is A Tibetan Dog, a cancer scare and turning a dream of a memory on it's head, that was some mind blowing stuff. I enjoyed the Links of Noltland sections so much I did a bit of googling to look for pictures and I laughed when I saw one photo of the team and found that Kathleen's descriptions of their clothing was spot on.
Fascinating stuff as always and as usual I'm left jealous of her experiences.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2020...
There are 3 big essay's here, two of them are the digs and the third is about time spent in Xiahe in Tibet when China shut the borders down and the students rose in protest. All three of them draw you in and it feels as if you are there, you sense the cold in Alaska, the wind of the Orkneys and the quiet of the monastery at Xiahe. Mixed in between are some short pieces, observations of things around us that we would normally miss, driving along and seeing an eagle and getting lost in the moment watching it glide effortlessly without beating it's wings.
A couple of favourite chapters of mine were the 3rd part of Links of Noltland, thinking of the people who lived there 5000 years ago and asking them question after question about their lives. Then there is A Tibetan Dog, a cancer scare and turning a dream of a memory on it's head, that was some mind blowing stuff. I enjoyed the Links of Noltland sections so much I did a bit of googling to look for pictures and I laughed when I saw one photo of the team and found that Kathleen's descriptions of their clothing was spot on.
Fascinating stuff as always and as usual I'm left jealous of her experiences.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2020...
May 22, 2020
Ridiculous that I didn't buy this as soon as it came out - Jamie is one of the best nature writers there is, and this is a beautiful collection of essays. There are three long pieces - two on archaeological digs and one on a youthful trip to Tibet(ish) - interspersed with beautiful short observational essays. She's interested in nature and landscape, but also people and history and life.
Want to read
September 21, 2019Nice WSJ review: https://www.wsj.com/articles/surfacin... (paywalled). Excerpts:
"At an archaeological dig in coastal Alaska, where Ms. Jamie is helping to excavate a buried village settled by natives some five centuries earlier, she thinks she smells “mince and tatties,” a hearty Scottish dish of meat and potatoes. Is she having some sort of olfactory hallucination evoked by her childhood? The scent, Ms. Jamie discovers, is from a part of the freshly unearthed site where seals and walruses were once skinned. “The air is so clean and sharp,” she writes, “you can smell seal-meat from five hundred years ago.” . . .
Listening to an Alaskan tribal member tell of the uncanny homing instinct of sled dogs, Ms. Jamie confesses that “I was unsure whether the event [he recounted] happened to him, or his grandfather, or someone else entirely. I don’t know whether it matters.” For a student of nature, she hints, time becomes a casual continuum, much like the fabled temporal stream in which Henry David Thoreau went a-fishing.
Ms. Jamie appears more gregarious than Thoreau and most other nature writers. While the genre is deeply populated by solitaries, her essays brim with people. “Surfacing” also chronicles her travels in Tibet, but some of the book’s most memorable essays grow from her native soil in Scotland, including “Elders,” an affectionate portrait of her aged father, who passes away in a “chair turned toward the window.”
"At an archaeological dig in coastal Alaska, where Ms. Jamie is helping to excavate a buried village settled by natives some five centuries earlier, she thinks she smells “mince and tatties,” a hearty Scottish dish of meat and potatoes. Is she having some sort of olfactory hallucination evoked by her childhood? The scent, Ms. Jamie discovers, is from a part of the freshly unearthed site where seals and walruses were once skinned. “The air is so clean and sharp,” she writes, “you can smell seal-meat from five hundred years ago.” . . .
Listening to an Alaskan tribal member tell of the uncanny homing instinct of sled dogs, Ms. Jamie confesses that “I was unsure whether the event [he recounted] happened to him, or his grandfather, or someone else entirely. I don’t know whether it matters.” For a student of nature, she hints, time becomes a casual continuum, much like the fabled temporal stream in which Henry David Thoreau went a-fishing.
Ms. Jamie appears more gregarious than Thoreau and most other nature writers. While the genre is deeply populated by solitaries, her essays brim with people. “Surfacing” also chronicles her travels in Tibet, but some of the book’s most memorable essays grow from her native soil in Scotland, including “Elders,” an affectionate portrait of her aged father, who passes away in a “chair turned toward the window.”
June 7, 2020
Four-and-a-half, almost five, stars.
Upfront confession. This book is full of things that I love. There are ancient artifacts, archaeology, and birds. Up close and personal with all of those are real human emotions that deal with our ancestors and how we treat them, whether they are simply our father, getting by on his own, or our more distant forefathers five hundred or five thousand years ago. All of it is very real.
I love the way that birds drop into all these stories, just like they do, unnoticed, in real life. Travelling the narrow roads of Orkney there are pipits and wagtails. Often there is a lark overhead. Along the shore lines of Orkney and Alaska there are waders like turnstones or sanderlings, geese overhead or loons calling. Things not everyone notices, but things I always see. For me they set my place and season, spring or autumn movements, summer or winter visitors. They give me a whole other story, little changed, going on as it has in the background, for centuries.
Surfacing is a collection of twelve very different stories. Most are very short, but three are long and complex. In those three we travel around the globe, from the Alaskan coast on the Bering Sea, to the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland and finally to China and the boarders of Tibet. Our timeframe is no less expansive, visiting the five-hundred-year-old remains of ancestors in Alaska to five thousand year old settlements in Orkney. In China we drop back into the author’s more distant past of the late 1980s. Sitting beneath the stories are the underlying concerns about the impact of climate changing on the planet. The reason that archaeologists are digging is the melting of the permafrost, or the changing winds and tides that have removed the sand dunes of Orkney.
In Quinhagak, Alaska, we listen to the difficulties of perspective:
“In a place with no rocks and no trees, the shape sat squarish, dark, prominent.
I stood on the top of a clump of earth and trained the binoculars. Even so, the animal was at the edge of my vision. How many miles away, I couldn’t say. Now I was fixated, waiting for the moment the creature moved and revealed its nature. It could be a woman picking berries, as it was berry season. Perhaps even a bear. We had been warned against walking down that way, alone. They kept a gun at the sight, just in case. I wanted this distant creature to be a bear. It was surely large enough. A bear eating berries on the tundra – how thrilling! I watched till my eyes strained. But then after long minutes, my woman-or-bear spread two black wings and took to the air. A raven! A raven, visible as an event on the landscape…Clearly there was work to do with scale…The past can spill out of the earth, become the present.”
As the permafrost melts, the objects of daily life from a five-hundred-year-old settlement are thrown to the surface and need to be quickly gathered in the short summer, before the tides wash them away or the sun dries them out. Jamie joins the archaeologists on their dig, watches as finds are gathered and then again as the items are shown to the Yup’ik elders who can place them in context and give them meaning. Past and present feel very close together. Everyone feels close to nature.
“I liked that people talked so readily and unembarrassedly about animals and birds and the land. They didn’t give ‘information’, instead they told incidents, anecdotes. Like coming at a subject sideways, not straight on.”
Moving to the Orkney Isles, the weather has removed the dunes to expose a settlement that was first made by the Neolithic peoples, five thousand years ago.
When Jamie arrives on the site and joins this second group of diggers, she gives us this wonderful introduction:
“Hazel led me round, introducing me to the team as they worked. In truth I saw their motley garments before I registered their faces, as they unbent from the ground: earth-caked jeans and fluorescent jackets, knitted headbands and piratical scarves, everyone seemed weather-worn under the Orkney light and salt winds. Archaeologists are accustomed to appraising what turns up; I felt duly appraised.”
Kathleen Jamie is a poet, and that keen eye for observation and language shines through in these twelve stories. Take your time though, because there are deeper, subtler themes running through this book, waiting to be unpicked.
Upfront confession. This book is full of things that I love. There are ancient artifacts, archaeology, and birds. Up close and personal with all of those are real human emotions that deal with our ancestors and how we treat them, whether they are simply our father, getting by on his own, or our more distant forefathers five hundred or five thousand years ago. All of it is very real.
I love the way that birds drop into all these stories, just like they do, unnoticed, in real life. Travelling the narrow roads of Orkney there are pipits and wagtails. Often there is a lark overhead. Along the shore lines of Orkney and Alaska there are waders like turnstones or sanderlings, geese overhead or loons calling. Things not everyone notices, but things I always see. For me they set my place and season, spring or autumn movements, summer or winter visitors. They give me a whole other story, little changed, going on as it has in the background, for centuries.
Surfacing is a collection of twelve very different stories. Most are very short, but three are long and complex. In those three we travel around the globe, from the Alaskan coast on the Bering Sea, to the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland and finally to China and the boarders of Tibet. Our timeframe is no less expansive, visiting the five-hundred-year-old remains of ancestors in Alaska to five thousand year old settlements in Orkney. In China we drop back into the author’s more distant past of the late 1980s. Sitting beneath the stories are the underlying concerns about the impact of climate changing on the planet. The reason that archaeologists are digging is the melting of the permafrost, or the changing winds and tides that have removed the sand dunes of Orkney.
In Quinhagak, Alaska, we listen to the difficulties of perspective:
“In a place with no rocks and no trees, the shape sat squarish, dark, prominent.
I stood on the top of a clump of earth and trained the binoculars. Even so, the animal was at the edge of my vision. How many miles away, I couldn’t say. Now I was fixated, waiting for the moment the creature moved and revealed its nature. It could be a woman picking berries, as it was berry season. Perhaps even a bear. We had been warned against walking down that way, alone. They kept a gun at the sight, just in case. I wanted this distant creature to be a bear. It was surely large enough. A bear eating berries on the tundra – how thrilling! I watched till my eyes strained. But then after long minutes, my woman-or-bear spread two black wings and took to the air. A raven! A raven, visible as an event on the landscape…Clearly there was work to do with scale…The past can spill out of the earth, become the present.”
As the permafrost melts, the objects of daily life from a five-hundred-year-old settlement are thrown to the surface and need to be quickly gathered in the short summer, before the tides wash them away or the sun dries them out. Jamie joins the archaeologists on their dig, watches as finds are gathered and then again as the items are shown to the Yup’ik elders who can place them in context and give them meaning. Past and present feel very close together. Everyone feels close to nature.
“I liked that people talked so readily and unembarrassedly about animals and birds and the land. They didn’t give ‘information’, instead they told incidents, anecdotes. Like coming at a subject sideways, not straight on.”
Moving to the Orkney Isles, the weather has removed the dunes to expose a settlement that was first made by the Neolithic peoples, five thousand years ago.
When Jamie arrives on the site and joins this second group of diggers, she gives us this wonderful introduction:
“Hazel led me round, introducing me to the team as they worked. In truth I saw their motley garments before I registered their faces, as they unbent from the ground: earth-caked jeans and fluorescent jackets, knitted headbands and piratical scarves, everyone seemed weather-worn under the Orkney light and salt winds. Archaeologists are accustomed to appraising what turns up; I felt duly appraised.”
Kathleen Jamie is a poet, and that keen eye for observation and language shines through in these twelve stories. Take your time though, because there are deeper, subtler themes running through this book, waiting to be unpicked.
March 26, 2019
With a need for calm and focus, that only quality nature writing can offer, Jamie shares ecology insight through a poets voice.
Opening with her daydreaming on train, reflecting on artifacts she's seen in local museums and how they transform you back to her original experiences with them.
It's an effortless transition to beautiful passages about landscape, discovery, and awakening, with a deep cultural and climate understanding.
Jamie characterizes herself in Robert Lewis Stevenson words 'a strong Scott's accent of the mind'.
Galley borrowed from the publisher.
Opening with her daydreaming on train, reflecting on artifacts she's seen in local museums and how they transform you back to her original experiences with them.
It's an effortless transition to beautiful passages about landscape, discovery, and awakening, with a deep cultural and climate understanding.
Jamie characterizes herself in Robert Lewis Stevenson words 'a strong Scott's accent of the mind'.
Galley borrowed from the publisher.
July 29, 2020
Quite a mix here.
The best of the stories are the shorter ones, particularly the first, The Reindeer Cave set in an area I know well, at Inchnadamph in Assynt.
The settings are appealing throughout; for example Links of Noltland, an archeolgical dig on Westray in Orkney, and In Quinhagak at a remote community in Alaska.
Jamie is at her strongest when describing the landscape and nature. Less appealing is her tendency in the longer stories to favour character development, the piece verging towards the atmosphere of a soap opera .
n the world of nature writing, Kathleen Jamie has caused something of a stir recently with her criticisms of Robert Macfarlane, particularly The Wild Places. From an interview for the Scottish Review Of Books,
Macfarlane points out that later in the book he does make this point himself..
The best of the stories are the shorter ones, particularly the first, The Reindeer Cave set in an area I know well, at Inchnadamph in Assynt.
The settings are appealing throughout; for example Links of Noltland, an archeolgical dig on Westray in Orkney, and In Quinhagak at a remote community in Alaska.
Jamie is at her strongest when describing the landscape and nature. Less appealing is her tendency in the longer stories to favour character development, the piece verging towards the atmosphere of a soap opera .
n the world of nature writing, Kathleen Jamie has caused something of a stir recently with her criticisms of Robert Macfarlane, particularly The Wild Places. From an interview for the Scottish Review Of Books,
Robert’s fine, he’s on the side of the angels, but I just got annoyed with this figure thinking that the only way you can participate in our landscapes is to be male and stride and swim and be macho. And the reason they’re empty – well, we know the reason why places are empty. And that’s only recently. There’ve been mesolithic people, neolithic people, bronze age people. These landscapes have been humanised for thousands of years. There’s nothing wild in this country. I’m afraid I reviewed his book, and said so. It started a bit of a conversation about what is ‘wild’.
Macfarlane points out that later in the book he does make this point himself..
August 25, 2019
An astonishing book, Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing is a collection of essays predominantly about our collective past and the objects which shape & bind us to our land and homes. Roaming from archeological digs on an Alaskan shore and a Scottish island, to travels through China, a woodland walk and thoughts on a train.
Overarching all this is a book about looking and seeing; examining space, light, nature, pondering history and the remembering of that which has been forgotten.
Jamie takes everyday objects, our own and archeological finds, she takes the quiet moments of her days, aging, the loss of parents, children grown, memories of youthful travels, fleeting moments of freedom, life and all its precious, transitory rush. Throughout is conveyed a deep rooted sense of connection and the weight and passage of time. Aware of our place in the world, Jamie holds both the fragility and resilience of humanity up to view with a clear eyed patience. Tactile, visceral, and grounded in place Surfacing is a kind of homecoming, fascinating, powerful and moving.
Overarching all this is a book about looking and seeing; examining space, light, nature, pondering history and the remembering of that which has been forgotten.
Jamie takes everyday objects, our own and archeological finds, she takes the quiet moments of her days, aging, the loss of parents, children grown, memories of youthful travels, fleeting moments of freedom, life and all its precious, transitory rush. Throughout is conveyed a deep rooted sense of connection and the weight and passage of time. Aware of our place in the world, Jamie holds both the fragility and resilience of humanity up to view with a clear eyed patience. Tactile, visceral, and grounded in place Surfacing is a kind of homecoming, fascinating, powerful and moving.
January 12, 2021
I enjoyed this collection of essays which are a combination of travel writing, nature writing, archaeology and memoir. Jamie is a poet as well as an essay writer and it shows in her style which has a beautiful, restful quality. The longer essays detailing her time spent on archaeological digs were especially insightful and interesting to me. A recommended "quiet" read.
September 28, 2020
Surfacing is one of the more difficult books to characterize. The dust jacket’s description as a “blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue” is a good start. For me, the first 100 pages devoted to Jamie’s trip to the village of Quinhagak in Alaska and learning about the Yup’ik natives was very interesting. The people were richly described. Insights were provided into hunter gatherers who have survived for centuries and will change their habits to survive in the future. As one described: “Why go someplace? We got the river, salmon, trout, fresh water.”
The next sections of book proved progressively less and less interesting. The Links of Noltland, and the archeological dig that discovered the Westray Wife in 2009 devoted too much time to discussing the daily lives of the archaeologists. The author had an interest in the topic which could have been satisfied with a good article in National Geographic or Smithsonian.
After leaving northern Scotland Jamie “surfaces” to discuss her mother and then a bout with cancer, which encouraged a re-visiting of her time as a young adult, when she traveled to Tibet, probably seeking an escape from an impending divorce. Here we spend too much time reading her travelogue memoirs, and not learning quite as much as we would like about the different personalities involved. For example, there is the enigmatic Elena – an Italian who speaks Chinese, English, Tibetan and spent two years in Lhasa. She comes and goes we no not where, during a time of rebellious protests. Only at the end do we discover she is a former heroin addict.
The author is to be commended on a great job in keeping a diary of her life during these different interludes. She could recall the detail of eating a cookie. Her poetry background is evident on some of the descriptions and observation she makes.
The book could have been improved through some better photos. The grainy black & white photos most certainly did not do justice to the real places she visited. The memoirs should have included dates when things were transpiring – it was very difficult to understand what years were being described.
To conclude, before I read this book for the first time, I would have been well served to do some Google research to get background on Kathleen Jamie, Quinhagak, Alaska, the Links of Nortland, Scotland and Xiahe, Tibet in 1989.
The next sections of book proved progressively less and less interesting. The Links of Noltland, and the archeological dig that discovered the Westray Wife in 2009 devoted too much time to discussing the daily lives of the archaeologists. The author had an interest in the topic which could have been satisfied with a good article in National Geographic or Smithsonian.
After leaving northern Scotland Jamie “surfaces” to discuss her mother and then a bout with cancer, which encouraged a re-visiting of her time as a young adult, when she traveled to Tibet, probably seeking an escape from an impending divorce. Here we spend too much time reading her travelogue memoirs, and not learning quite as much as we would like about the different personalities involved. For example, there is the enigmatic Elena – an Italian who speaks Chinese, English, Tibetan and spent two years in Lhasa. She comes and goes we no not where, during a time of rebellious protests. Only at the end do we discover she is a former heroin addict.
The author is to be commended on a great job in keeping a diary of her life during these different interludes. She could recall the detail of eating a cookie. Her poetry background is evident on some of the descriptions and observation she makes.
The book could have been improved through some better photos. The grainy black & white photos most certainly did not do justice to the real places she visited. The memoirs should have included dates when things were transpiring – it was very difficult to understand what years were being described.
To conclude, before I read this book for the first time, I would have been well served to do some Google research to get background on Kathleen Jamie, Quinhagak, Alaska, the Links of Nortland, Scotland and Xiahe, Tibet in 1989.
October 25, 2020
"Dropped by accident, thrown in temper, perhaps grieved over - they all ended up on the midden and were eventually ploughed into the field along with the dung, where they remain, sometimes to resurface for a while.
Now you have a handful, spanning centuries. And there's another piece, winking from the grounds; this could become obsessive. Each is a glimpse of a life and a time. It begins to sound like a clamour rising like mist from the empty field. All the stories, the voices, the dead...
You look out over the new-ploughed acres as over human history, and the next field too and the next, and all the fields...
Ach.
They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again." (p.176-77)
Now you have a handful, spanning centuries. And there's another piece, winking from the grounds; this could become obsessive. Each is a glimpse of a life and a time. It begins to sound like a clamour rising like mist from the empty field. All the stories, the voices, the dead...
You look out over the new-ploughed acres as over human history, and the next field too and the next, and all the fields...
Ach.
They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again." (p.176-77)
July 31, 2023
A poet in her essays too, Jamie potently evokes Alaska, the Orkneys, Tibet, the local woods where she goes for release. An archaeologist, her essays delve through layers on layers of time and perspective. I stretched the reading to last over several Sundays and look forward to reading it again.
March 19, 2022
another outstandingly beautiful book by kathleen jamie, I love her writing so much
June 26, 2020
Surfacing is Kathleen Jamie’s third collection of nature-writing essays, following Findings and Sightlines, both of which I enjoyed immensely. Unlike her previous two collections, Surfacing is dominated by two novella-length pieces on archaeological digs and their relationship with the landscape around them – ‘In Quinhagak’ explores the University of Aberdeen’s excavations at the Nunalleq site near the Yup’ik village of Quinhagak in Alaska, while ‘Links of Noltland’ focuses on the excavation of Neolithic remains on Orkney. The former essay is especially interesting because of the presence of the Yup’ik community, who support the archaeological dig because it’s uncovering evidence of their pre-contact culture. As Jamie writes, ‘It’s about saying, this is yours. Everything you feared you lost, or never even knew you had. Look. It’s here. It’s back.’ The Links of Noltland dig, exploring a time unfathomably more ancient, has no such direct living connection, but the meticulous work of the archaeologists builds up a sense of what the community must have been like. At one point, Jamie is helping two of the researchers, Dan and Anna, explore a particular patch:
'[Dan] had the enclosure wall to deal with and, in its lee, many flints. His patch was covered in little polythene bags, each containing a bit of flint. Anna and I, just a metre further into the enclosure, had only brown earth which yielded occasional small morsels of bone. I pretended outrage when Hazel came by. “Miss! It’s not fair! He’s getting all these finds, and we’re not.”
Hazel’s answer seemed visionary. She glanced and said, “They must have been sitting on the wall, flint-knapping.”
Sat right there on their village wall in the afternoon sunshine, working and chatting. I almost saw them.'
Jamie’s writing is as clear and brilliant as ever, but this collection felt slightly unbalanced by the dominance of these two long pieces. None of the very short pieces interspersed throughout worked for me, although I enjoyed a couple of the medium-length pieces; ‘The Wind Horse’, a bit of a departure from Jamie’s usual work, evocatively returns to her travels as a young woman in Xiahe, which is formally part of China but ‘ethnically and culturally Tibetan’, and ‘Elders’ is a moving piece about the ageing and death of her dad. Unlike Sightlines, Surfacing is also less successful at pulling together Jamie’s travel-writing with her emotional reflections on her own life; both are present in this book but tend to be explored in separate essays. Nevertheless, I would recommend this thoughtful, beautiful collection, especially if you are interested in questions of historical and cultural preservation.
'[Dan] had the enclosure wall to deal with and, in its lee, many flints. His patch was covered in little polythene bags, each containing a bit of flint. Anna and I, just a metre further into the enclosure, had only brown earth which yielded occasional small morsels of bone. I pretended outrage when Hazel came by. “Miss! It’s not fair! He’s getting all these finds, and we’re not.”
Hazel’s answer seemed visionary. She glanced and said, “They must have been sitting on the wall, flint-knapping.”
Sat right there on their village wall in the afternoon sunshine, working and chatting. I almost saw them.'
Jamie’s writing is as clear and brilliant as ever, but this collection felt slightly unbalanced by the dominance of these two long pieces. None of the very short pieces interspersed throughout worked for me, although I enjoyed a couple of the medium-length pieces; ‘The Wind Horse’, a bit of a departure from Jamie’s usual work, evocatively returns to her travels as a young woman in Xiahe, which is formally part of China but ‘ethnically and culturally Tibetan’, and ‘Elders’ is a moving piece about the ageing and death of her dad. Unlike Sightlines, Surfacing is also less successful at pulling together Jamie’s travel-writing with her emotional reflections on her own life; both are present in this book but tend to be explored in separate essays. Nevertheless, I would recommend this thoughtful, beautiful collection, especially if you are interested in questions of historical and cultural preservation.
June 28, 2024
“We don’t live long, do we?”
Part memoir and part travelogue, Surfacing takes us from a Yup’ik village in Alaska to the farm lands of Scotland - remembering the past, while reflecting on and admiring all that surrounds.
“Above all, the sky. Every hue of sky was present at once, here a shower, there rays of sunshine filtering through, there openings of blue, and every white and grey of cloud. Shadows of clouds drifted over the land. It was a dream vision, a mythic view of land before farms, before towns and roads, unparcelled, unprivatised, whole.”
It’s a ode to our ancestors, to community, and to nature.
“I often imagine what it must be like for the big birds. Like eagles, who feel the air so much more than we do, much more sensitive. You know how they loop round and round, feeling out the thermals that will lift them? It must be like swimming in a lake, bathing now in warmth, now in coolness…”
Exquisite.
Part memoir and part travelogue, Surfacing takes us from a Yup’ik village in Alaska to the farm lands of Scotland - remembering the past, while reflecting on and admiring all that surrounds.
“Above all, the sky. Every hue of sky was present at once, here a shower, there rays of sunshine filtering through, there openings of blue, and every white and grey of cloud. Shadows of clouds drifted over the land. It was a dream vision, a mythic view of land before farms, before towns and roads, unparcelled, unprivatised, whole.”
It’s a ode to our ancestors, to community, and to nature.
“I often imagine what it must be like for the big birds. Like eagles, who feel the air so much more than we do, much more sensitive. You know how they loop round and round, feeling out the thermals that will lift them? It must be like swimming in a lake, bathing now in warmth, now in coolness…”
Exquisite.
July 16, 2020
http://www.bookwormblues.net/2020/07/...
Recently, I was in the mood to read something a bit different. Something about somewhere I’ve never been, a place I’ve never heard of. I wanted to read a book written with lush language, evocative prose. I wanted, basically, to go on a journey.
I came across this book randomly. In fact, I was wandering around Amazon, and I happened upon it. I noticed the author has won some awards for her essays and poetry, and I knew this was exactly what I was looking for. I was lucky enough to discover my library had a copy of the book, so I put it on hold and, here we are.
Surfacing is not a long book. I usually read tomes that clock in at over 500 pages, so this particular book really only took me a day or so to read, but what a day it was.
Surfacing is essentially two long essays connected by theme of erosion, of environmental change, of a merging of the past and the present. Mixed into this, are a few shorter essays that give readers a more visceral, personal eye view of some of these places and issues that Kathleen Jamie experiences. All in all, she weaves these bits of narrative and personal history together to create a lush tapestry for readers to engage with. Not only is she discussing archeological sites that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old, but she’s also telling the human story of how these places resonate with people today.
It was quite an interesting read, and another take on archeology and human history that I’ve never really experienced before. Honestly, I’m not even sure what genre this would be. Part travelogue, part personal story, part modern-day journalism, Jamie manages to weave all these different parts together to create a book that just completely swept me away.
The first essay she writes is also the longest one, and probably the one that interested me the most. Jamie traveled up to Alaska, and spent a bit of time in a Yup’ik village called Quinhagak, only accessible by airplane. This town, far out in the hinterlands of the far north, is home to a few hundred souls. Near the town is an archeological dig that has been attracting numerous wandering souls over the years, from National Geographic photographers and writers, to people like Kathleen Jamie, who are a different sort of reporter altogether.
The archeological dig is five hundred years old, excavating the native population who lived in that area so long ago. In many ways, this dig is helping strengthen the roots of the residents who still live in that village, who have blood, family, and cultural ties to those who came before. Due to erosion, however, everything is changing. The Yup’ik village has to move, as the land under their homes keeps slipping away as the permafrost melts, and the archeological site is also at risk. In a lot of ways, it’s a race against time.
However, the link between an ancient hunter-gatherer civilization and modern-day life is explored here, and as layers of dirt are moved, and objects are found, Kathleen Jamie not only discusses those ephemeral ties that bind yesteryear to the present, but also what connects the people to the land. The relationship between modern convenience, modern struggles, the vast and ever-changing landscape, and the results of things like global warming, on the lives of those today. Echoes of the past are still very present in the people who live in the surrounding area, and with a very thoughtful, lyrical approach, Jamie slowly studies all of these threads in this essay. By the end of it, I felt like I’d been up in Alaska, in this Yup’ik village, living with these people and learning how to approach the land, and history in a brand new way.
I will also say, the more intimate glimpse into how melting permafrost is directly impacting the lives of people, and their security really gave me a new respect and understanding for just how catastrophic global warming really is. It’s easy to ignore it, where I live. Sure, the summers are hot and we’ve got some amazing inversions in the winter, but otherwise, global warming is a thing that happens to other people. However, Jamie really does touch on the subject in a very deft way, and I felt incredibly moved by just how profoundly this is being felt by some people, and just how life-altering it really is.
In one part of this essay, a woman had to have her entire house moved, because the land under it was slipping away. The winter was too warm, and so there was no hunting of the sort that they traditionally do to get them through the winter because, for example, the caribou never came far enough down the mountains. And while this archeological dig is very much connecting a current people to their distant roots, I often felt like they were one group of people living in two very different worlds, because the reality of life five hundred years ago must have been so dramatically different than now, with melting permafrost, altered animal migration patterns due to warmer winters, overfishing concerns and the like, which are fundamentally impacting the way of life of so many.
The second essay in the book takes place on an island, just off the coast of Scotland, where erosion of sand dunes has exposed a very well preserved Neolithic community. This essay is a bit shorter than the Alaska one, and I’m not sure why it didn’t grip me quite as much as the first (though it was probably just because I found the stint in Alaska so interesting, I kind of had a book hangover from reading it) but it was still really fascinating. In this essay, Jamie spends some time on this archeological dig. This particular group of archeologists, working on the Links of Noltland, are facing an imminent funding problem, and so the entire dig is at risk (from a google search, I think I read the government continued funding this dig).
Jamie explores the relationship between these paleolithic ancient farmers to the land they lived on, and dives into the relationship between people, to the wilderness. In doing this, she also explores the idea of time, and how, thin that connection is, between the present and the past. As though diving beneath layers of soil to discover what lay beneath, somehow helps us peel back layers of time, so we might not only understand our ancestors, and how they lived, but also understand different ways of loving the planet on which we reside.
Ultimately, Surfacing tells the story of Kathleen Jamie on a few different archeological digs, and while it’s interesting to see where she’s been and what she’s been doing, there’s a deeper message in this book, and it really hit home for me. Here, are two very different places, studying two groups of extremely different groups of ancient people, and yet both of these sites are facing the same issues: erosion, and how it will, given time, erase and completely destroy these places and in so doing, our connection to them. Nature is a force that will not bargain with humanity, and in in this book, Jamie left me with the profound need to not only understand what we are doing to this world we live on, but what it would be like if we started loving our planet again. If we redefined our relationship with the wild. If we examined our past, and perhaps internalized some of these messages that have echoed through so many layers of time.
Told with a poet’s love for language, and an eye for the environment, Surfacing might be a short book, but it packed quite a punch. It will be resonating through me for quite a while.
Recently, I was in the mood to read something a bit different. Something about somewhere I’ve never been, a place I’ve never heard of. I wanted to read a book written with lush language, evocative prose. I wanted, basically, to go on a journey.
I came across this book randomly. In fact, I was wandering around Amazon, and I happened upon it. I noticed the author has won some awards for her essays and poetry, and I knew this was exactly what I was looking for. I was lucky enough to discover my library had a copy of the book, so I put it on hold and, here we are.
Surfacing is not a long book. I usually read tomes that clock in at over 500 pages, so this particular book really only took me a day or so to read, but what a day it was.
Surfacing is essentially two long essays connected by theme of erosion, of environmental change, of a merging of the past and the present. Mixed into this, are a few shorter essays that give readers a more visceral, personal eye view of some of these places and issues that Kathleen Jamie experiences. All in all, she weaves these bits of narrative and personal history together to create a lush tapestry for readers to engage with. Not only is she discussing archeological sites that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old, but she’s also telling the human story of how these places resonate with people today.
It was quite an interesting read, and another take on archeology and human history that I’ve never really experienced before. Honestly, I’m not even sure what genre this would be. Part travelogue, part personal story, part modern-day journalism, Jamie manages to weave all these different parts together to create a book that just completely swept me away.
The first essay she writes is also the longest one, and probably the one that interested me the most. Jamie traveled up to Alaska, and spent a bit of time in a Yup’ik village called Quinhagak, only accessible by airplane. This town, far out in the hinterlands of the far north, is home to a few hundred souls. Near the town is an archeological dig that has been attracting numerous wandering souls over the years, from National Geographic photographers and writers, to people like Kathleen Jamie, who are a different sort of reporter altogether.
The archeological dig is five hundred years old, excavating the native population who lived in that area so long ago. In many ways, this dig is helping strengthen the roots of the residents who still live in that village, who have blood, family, and cultural ties to those who came before. Due to erosion, however, everything is changing. The Yup’ik village has to move, as the land under their homes keeps slipping away as the permafrost melts, and the archeological site is also at risk. In a lot of ways, it’s a race against time.
However, the link between an ancient hunter-gatherer civilization and modern-day life is explored here, and as layers of dirt are moved, and objects are found, Kathleen Jamie not only discusses those ephemeral ties that bind yesteryear to the present, but also what connects the people to the land. The relationship between modern convenience, modern struggles, the vast and ever-changing landscape, and the results of things like global warming, on the lives of those today. Echoes of the past are still very present in the people who live in the surrounding area, and with a very thoughtful, lyrical approach, Jamie slowly studies all of these threads in this essay. By the end of it, I felt like I’d been up in Alaska, in this Yup’ik village, living with these people and learning how to approach the land, and history in a brand new way.
I will also say, the more intimate glimpse into how melting permafrost is directly impacting the lives of people, and their security really gave me a new respect and understanding for just how catastrophic global warming really is. It’s easy to ignore it, where I live. Sure, the summers are hot and we’ve got some amazing inversions in the winter, but otherwise, global warming is a thing that happens to other people. However, Jamie really does touch on the subject in a very deft way, and I felt incredibly moved by just how profoundly this is being felt by some people, and just how life-altering it really is.
In one part of this essay, a woman had to have her entire house moved, because the land under it was slipping away. The winter was too warm, and so there was no hunting of the sort that they traditionally do to get them through the winter because, for example, the caribou never came far enough down the mountains. And while this archeological dig is very much connecting a current people to their distant roots, I often felt like they were one group of people living in two very different worlds, because the reality of life five hundred years ago must have been so dramatically different than now, with melting permafrost, altered animal migration patterns due to warmer winters, overfishing concerns and the like, which are fundamentally impacting the way of life of so many.
The second essay in the book takes place on an island, just off the coast of Scotland, where erosion of sand dunes has exposed a very well preserved Neolithic community. This essay is a bit shorter than the Alaska one, and I’m not sure why it didn’t grip me quite as much as the first (though it was probably just because I found the stint in Alaska so interesting, I kind of had a book hangover from reading it) but it was still really fascinating. In this essay, Jamie spends some time on this archeological dig. This particular group of archeologists, working on the Links of Noltland, are facing an imminent funding problem, and so the entire dig is at risk (from a google search, I think I read the government continued funding this dig).
Jamie explores the relationship between these paleolithic ancient farmers to the land they lived on, and dives into the relationship between people, to the wilderness. In doing this, she also explores the idea of time, and how, thin that connection is, between the present and the past. As though diving beneath layers of soil to discover what lay beneath, somehow helps us peel back layers of time, so we might not only understand our ancestors, and how they lived, but also understand different ways of loving the planet on which we reside.
Ultimately, Surfacing tells the story of Kathleen Jamie on a few different archeological digs, and while it’s interesting to see where she’s been and what she’s been doing, there’s a deeper message in this book, and it really hit home for me. Here, are two very different places, studying two groups of extremely different groups of ancient people, and yet both of these sites are facing the same issues: erosion, and how it will, given time, erase and completely destroy these places and in so doing, our connection to them. Nature is a force that will not bargain with humanity, and in in this book, Jamie left me with the profound need to not only understand what we are doing to this world we live on, but what it would be like if we started loving our planet again. If we redefined our relationship with the wild. If we examined our past, and perhaps internalized some of these messages that have echoed through so many layers of time.
Told with a poet’s love for language, and an eye for the environment, Surfacing might be a short book, but it packed quite a punch. It will be resonating through me for quite a while.
May 9, 2023
It's hard to explain what this book is about - archaeology, poetry, culture, connection? A meditation on what we can suppress and what we can't, what remains hidden and what is brought to surface, sometimes after millennia. What changes, what remains the same - what can't. From the most remote islands of Scotland to the remains of a thousands-years-old village in Alaska, author Kathleen Jamie muses on these questions.
As one woman who lives on the remote island, Westray, in the Orkney Islands said:
"We didn't have electricity - we had a tilly lamp. A gas light! ... We were never bored... we got on with it." She looks around. "We can't go on like this... everything on your doorstep. The kids come home, it's phones, TV... There was something about a tilly lamp, it was warm..."
The author asks her:
"Would you go back to those days?"
"No," the woman replies firmly. "I would not."
We all know it. We can't go on like this, but we wouldn't go back either, to the stone ploughshare and the early death. Maybe that's why the folk ere don't embrace their Neolithic site much. It's still too close to the knuckle.
As one woman who lives on the remote island, Westray, in the Orkney Islands said:
"We didn't have electricity - we had a tilly lamp. A gas light! ... We were never bored... we got on with it." She looks around. "We can't go on like this... everything on your doorstep. The kids come home, it's phones, TV... There was something about a tilly lamp, it was warm..."
The author asks her:
"Would you go back to those days?"
"No," the woman replies firmly. "I would not."
We all know it. We can't go on like this, but we wouldn't go back either, to the stone ploughshare and the early death. Maybe that's why the folk ere don't embrace their Neolithic site much. It's still too close to the knuckle.
August 8, 2020
I found this book in a donut shop in Arlington, VA, where I spent most of early 2020 before my dad died in March. It caught my eye in their lending library because Jamie has won a John Burroughs Medal, and I was partway through "The Song of Trees," for which Haskell won a JB Medal, as well, and I've really been enjoying environmental non-fiction. My star rating doesn't totally reflect my emotional experience with this book: there was something oddly soothing reading a poet's prose about Neolithic ruins while bearing witness to someone's death, and this book was one I could come back to throughout this year without losing the connection to the story despite significant lapses in time. There are times that I think Jamie came close to exoticizing her subjects (the book includes passages about Alaska, a Tibetan town in China, and Scotland), but I think she recognized and addressed that tendency relatively successfully by the book's end, and she has a great deal of compassion for the world, both human and everything else.
March 30, 2025
I like Jamie’s writing enormously, but of the several books by her that I have read, I found this the weakest. Now that’s a high benchmark and this is still very good - but I found it uneven.
There are a couple of longer pieces, one about 100 pages long, and several shorter pieces - typical of those that I am used to from her other books. The longer pieces are about archeological digs. The content is factually interesting, but as pieces of writing they are less exceptional.
I enjoy her writing most often with the shorter pieces she writes, where her brilliant observations and her poet’s use of language combine best.
There are some excellent pieces here but the standard is not consistent. So overall, very good - just not her best.
There are a couple of longer pieces, one about 100 pages long, and several shorter pieces - typical of those that I am used to from her other books. The longer pieces are about archeological digs. The content is factually interesting, but as pieces of writing they are less exceptional.
I enjoy her writing most often with the shorter pieces she writes, where her brilliant observations and her poet’s use of language combine best.
There are some excellent pieces here but the standard is not consistent. So overall, very good - just not her best.
October 5, 2021
Well I have to say, given all the amazing reviews on here, I was expecting a work of absolute brilliance.
I was severely disappointed.
Whilst I agree that Kathleen Jamie has a talent for the poetic, I felt a lot of her talent was wasted here discussing the prosaic and pedestrian intricacies of archaeology. The Noltland chapters were way too long and repetitive for my liking. The chapter on Tibet overly concentrated on the other people she was with or met, despite the amazing surroundings.
There were flashes of inspired writing (The Eagle and Elders chapters) but mostly, I think this offering from Jamie was just very average.
I was severely disappointed.
Whilst I agree that Kathleen Jamie has a talent for the poetic, I felt a lot of her talent was wasted here discussing the prosaic and pedestrian intricacies of archaeology. The Noltland chapters were way too long and repetitive for my liking. The chapter on Tibet overly concentrated on the other people she was with or met, despite the amazing surroundings.
There were flashes of inspired writing (The Eagle and Elders chapters) but mostly, I think this offering from Jamie was just very average.
October 30, 2020
It holds some nice descriptions and perceptions of natural world splendor. The ancient artifacts are splendid. Much else of her extrapolation to wider emotions and mores? Just OK on that. Yes we are mere whiffs in the ages of Earth time. But sorry no, any type of supreme aware and intrepid physical life in the past resulting in old age infirmity and death by age 23 is not homo sapiens celebration fodder, IMHO. Despite how "natural". I loved her explanations of human increasing observation and minute attending skills in lengths of such dwellings. Those were spot on.
September 5, 2022
Not as good as Findings (which was so revelatory I literally created a Goodreads account in order to review it), but still a great piece of writing.
Largely focused on archeology, on memory, on nature and isolated communities.
The two essays about Tibet in particular were fantastic.
Largely focused on archeology, on memory, on nature and isolated communities.
The two essays about Tibet in particular were fantastic.
November 21, 2021
Five stars for the first two essays and for the contrast between them regarding the impact of the excavations on the communities. The others didn't hit me as hard, but still fine reading.
June 7, 2021
Kathleen Jamie is an author I can always rely on if I want to read something contemplative about nature. Jamie, who is based in Scotland, is both a poet and essayist, and I have thoroughly enjoyed her collections in the past. Surfacing is her newest effort, published in 2019. Diana Athill summed it up wonderfully when she commented: 'It is not often that the prose of a poet is as powerful as her verse, but Jamie's is.'
As I expected, having read several of her collections to date, Surfacing is heavily involved with the natural world. In these twelve individual essays, some of which have recurring themes, Jamie discusses archaeology, notions of discovery, climate change, her parents and their influence, and wildlife, amongst others. Each essay is interspersed with photographs and illustrations, many of which I believe Jamie took herself.
The essays in Surfacing move between Scotland, Alaska, and Jamie's memory. It is a visceral collection, arranged non-chronologically. Here, Jamie has visited 'archaeological sites and mines her own memories... to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past.' The majority of the essays here were written at pivotal points in Jamie's life, from when she was caught up in brutal protests in China in the late 1980s, and banned from leaving the country, to stages at which her father passes away, and her children grow up and leave home. This collection promises to examine 'a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.'
Some of the essays in Surfacing are very brief, and I was left wanting more. This is not a criticism of what Jamie has written; rather, it is a testament to her prose, and the way in which I wanted to read more from her perspective. It is in the longer pieces in which Jamie's work sings. I particularly enjoyed reading the essays about archaeological digs; so many of the details within them were fascinating to me as a reader.
My favourite piece was 'In Quinhagak', a small settlement in Alaska which has been dated to at least AD 1000. Jamie travels to assist on an archaeological dig, in a secluded town of around 700 people, where the maps 'show no roads, just green scribbly waterways and melt-pools.' I always admire the way in which the author captures scenery and details. As Jamie is taken to the town on a very small plane, she observes: '... immediately we were soaring over miles of emerald green and moss green, yellowish patches with coppery tints... At seven hundred feet we were low enough to see a line of moose tracks traversing a mudbank. Two white dabs were tundra swans.' In an essay entitled 'The Eagle', she writes: 'It's summer, a long July gloaming. The road I'm taking cuts through a rough glen. There are no houses on this stretch, only the thin road and a lochan of peat-coloured water. The hill on the left is a steep strew of bare rock and heather rising to a ridge which runs north for about a mile and a half; the hill on the right is lower. The whole glen, now I've stopped, has become a place of entrancing isolation.'
Jamie is sensitive to cultural differences, and to what it means for very specific elements of history to be returned to the living generations. At the dig in Alaska, in which the plan is to excavate a village which was abandoned around five hundred years previously, she comments: 'The objects are out of the earth, back in the hands of people who call them into memory and know them, weigh them, test them, name them. Truly, they have come home.'
It is fair to say that Jamie's prose is sometimes simplistic and rather matter-of-fact. This is something which I find surprising, given that she is a poet too. However, her prose style undoubtedly works well within these essays; it allows her to blend different genres of writing, from (auto)biography and history to travel and nature writing. She looks into neolithic history, as well as the histories bound up between her own family. I very much enjoyed the variations within these essays, which made Surfacing so easy to read from cover to cover. Of course, it would also be a great choice to dip and out of, and to savour.
As I expected, having read several of her collections to date, Surfacing is heavily involved with the natural world. In these twelve individual essays, some of which have recurring themes, Jamie discusses archaeology, notions of discovery, climate change, her parents and their influence, and wildlife, amongst others. Each essay is interspersed with photographs and illustrations, many of which I believe Jamie took herself.
The essays in Surfacing move between Scotland, Alaska, and Jamie's memory. It is a visceral collection, arranged non-chronologically. Here, Jamie has visited 'archaeological sites and mines her own memories... to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past.' The majority of the essays here were written at pivotal points in Jamie's life, from when she was caught up in brutal protests in China in the late 1980s, and banned from leaving the country, to stages at which her father passes away, and her children grow up and leave home. This collection promises to examine 'a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.'
Some of the essays in Surfacing are very brief, and I was left wanting more. This is not a criticism of what Jamie has written; rather, it is a testament to her prose, and the way in which I wanted to read more from her perspective. It is in the longer pieces in which Jamie's work sings. I particularly enjoyed reading the essays about archaeological digs; so many of the details within them were fascinating to me as a reader.
My favourite piece was 'In Quinhagak', a small settlement in Alaska which has been dated to at least AD 1000. Jamie travels to assist on an archaeological dig, in a secluded town of around 700 people, where the maps 'show no roads, just green scribbly waterways and melt-pools.' I always admire the way in which the author captures scenery and details. As Jamie is taken to the town on a very small plane, she observes: '... immediately we were soaring over miles of emerald green and moss green, yellowish patches with coppery tints... At seven hundred feet we were low enough to see a line of moose tracks traversing a mudbank. Two white dabs were tundra swans.' In an essay entitled 'The Eagle', she writes: 'It's summer, a long July gloaming. The road I'm taking cuts through a rough glen. There are no houses on this stretch, only the thin road and a lochan of peat-coloured water. The hill on the left is a steep strew of bare rock and heather rising to a ridge which runs north for about a mile and a half; the hill on the right is lower. The whole glen, now I've stopped, has become a place of entrancing isolation.'
Jamie is sensitive to cultural differences, and to what it means for very specific elements of history to be returned to the living generations. At the dig in Alaska, in which the plan is to excavate a village which was abandoned around five hundred years previously, she comments: 'The objects are out of the earth, back in the hands of people who call them into memory and know them, weigh them, test them, name them. Truly, they have come home.'
It is fair to say that Jamie's prose is sometimes simplistic and rather matter-of-fact. This is something which I find surprising, given that she is a poet too. However, her prose style undoubtedly works well within these essays; it allows her to blend different genres of writing, from (auto)biography and history to travel and nature writing. She looks into neolithic history, as well as the histories bound up between her own family. I very much enjoyed the variations within these essays, which made Surfacing so easy to read from cover to cover. Of course, it would also be a great choice to dip and out of, and to savour.
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