Book reviews: Cairn, by Kathleen Jamie and Seaglass, by Kathryn Tann – new nature writing mourns 'the great dismantling'

In these evocative collections of nature writing both Kathleen Jamie and Kathryn Tann are concerned with how the past informs the present, writes Stuart Kelly

The phrase “nature writing”, whether or not it is qualified by “new”, is an increasingly unstable description. It would tax the classification skills of a Carl Linnaeus to taxonomise all the variations of memoir, travelogue, popular science, philosophy, ecology, polemic, elegy, obloquy and epiphany. It cannot even be reduced to writing about the zoosphere of living things, since living things require non-living environments in which to live. But people in bookshops need signs, so nature writing it is. The precarious quality of the genre is evident in both of these books. Kathryn Tann’s debut is subtitled “essays, moments and reflections”; Kathleen Jamie’s new collection, after Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing seems reconciled to its bricolage. “I wrote about incidents, memories, moments that caught my attention. They were distillations and observations. Testimonies. Over a few years I found myself assembling them into this book. A cairn of sorts”. Cairns are ambiguous; unbodied graves marking the had-been-here, signs indicating where you are and might go.

It might seem unfair to pair a first book with a book by an established writer, and Jamie certainly shows accomplishment as much as Tann shows talent, but both are interestingly concerned with the topic being something fundamentally in the past tense. The difference can be gauged when they are writing about the same subject. In “On Collected Sea Glass” Tann describes it thus: “The largest piece, almost like a marble in its roundness, is an unusual shade. It’s the colour of the jelly between pork and pastry. A pale, oaty-rose colour, sugared but still translucent”. This is good, though the marble similie is unnecessary, and it has a metaphysical oddness to it, even if it maybe tries a little hard to be ingenious. Jamie writes: “In the stubble field I found a piece of old glass, creamy with streaks of grey-blue, like a fragment of sky that had been shot down”. This is simpler, but the stubble introduces a sense of aftermath and the violence of the final verb is shuddersome.

Tann sets out in that first essay that what binds the book is “a cathartic dive into my own unexamined journey into womanhood”. One of the best pieces is about teenage acne, which conditions and blocks her relationship with both the elements and herself. It is a raw piece, made more so because “spottiness” is normally figured as something immature and almost comical, rather than debilitating. It does not fall into any naïve healing aspect of nature rhetoric. To my mind, the two best pieces are “The Nature of Change” and “Between Lines”. The latter is a worthy addition to the literature of nature’s infiltration into the urban and the disjuncture between the pixel of maps and the lived experience of territory. The former skilfully balances resilience and regret, and is astute on the impossibility of a “return to normal” “How do we know” she asks “which before was the right one?” Some pieces, however, are “gethir-ups”. For example, the piece on food memories, “How To Make The Perfect Gravy” elicited my “Why exactly are you telling me this?” response. Nonetheless, this is a good maiden over.

Cairn on the summit of West Lomond, Fife. "Cairns are ambiguous; unbodied graves marking the had-been-here, signs indicating where you are and might go." PIC: RDImages/Epics/Getty Images

Kathleen Jamie’s new collection, a mixture of poetry and prose, deals with aging in a striking way, by interrogating her younger self mercilessly. In the opening piece she reflects (naturally) on her poem “At Point of Ness”. The poem ends “never ever / harm this / you never could” (it’s set out on the page more interestingly than newspapers allow). She realises that “the early 1990s were the last of the before times”. Even something as mundane as a telephone wire encodes something apocalyptic: “Again the sky darkens, the next sleety vanguard arrives out of the west, and one by one the drops begin to vanish – a winking out here, a tiny extinction there”. Matthew Arnold referred to his friend and fellow poet Arthur Clough (ludicrously underrated these days) as the “too-quick despairer”. Jamie’s collection is determined not to succumb to being a Cassandra or Jeremiah, in full realisation of that difficulty. In an immensely affecting moment she recalls her son saying, á propos of the climate cataclysm “‘I’m going to live through this’, and it clenched my heart. I thought: Please do. Please, please do”. Another essay tracks back to the Hvalsalen (whale-hall) in Bergen about which she has written before, and an exhibition juxtaposing cetacean skeletons and plastic bags (one almost menacingly emblazoned “Fresh”). This captures the cognitive shock in swift sketches; curiously, one of Tann’s essays discusses swans using plastic to construct nests. I prefer Jamie’s aghast surrealism to the strained admiration of cygnet upcycling. There is a wry humour in a piece about protest marches, again pitting admirable young zeal with mordant maturity: Thatcher’s concern for the ozone layer becomes an uncomfortable self-rebuke. The Postcript to the collection is a form of cento, taking snippets of the previous pieces and reworking them, a bravura transformation of what was presented as “call them what you will” pieces into a coherent whole.

Whether it is dealing with the legacy of youth, or coping with, as in Jamie’s words, the idea that “if we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive”, both writers, oddly come up with the great urgency of the lyric poet Rilke in “Torso of an Archaic Apollo”: Du mußt dein Leben ändern. You must change your life.

Cairn, by Kathleen Jamie, Sort Of Books, £9.99; Seaglass, by Kathryn Tann, Calon, £16.99