Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie published her first poem 'View from the Cliffs' in 1979 at the age of just seventeen. In the following discussion the notion of a Romantic inheritance will be used as a way of contextualising Jamie's more recent output, particularly her collections ]izzen (1999) and The Tree House (2004). The legacy of Romanticism will be used to bring into focus a number of wider issues, including Jamie's engagement with the natural world, her place in various poetic traditions, and her acute interest in the politics of the environment. This framework is echoed in a review by Andrew Matt who compares Jamie's prose writing to the work of eighteenth-century English naturalist Gilbert White. If 'View from the Cliffs' looks backwards and in doing so evokes the aesthetics of the early eighteenth century, it is also possessed of a remarkable foresight. Our own ecologically attuned senses will doubtless recognise in Jamie's poem the contemporary debate surrounding food miles and the environmental cost of global trade. From the late 1970s the poem anticipates our own age and the fraught ideological terrain of environmental politics. This chapter explores the ways in which Jamie's poetry engages with the melange of issues that gather under this green umbrella. It suggests that her poetry reconnects us with the natural world in a way that both science and the mainstream coverage of the environmental crisis have so far failed to do.