The Keelie Hawk by Kathleen Jamie review: 'in embracing Scots she has unlocked a fresh toolbox'
A handful of years ago at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, Scotland’s then Makar Kathleen Jamie read some poems in Scots. Like many of us, she was raised with the language but discouraged from using it. While she had previously used Scots words and phrases in her poems, she explained that she had lacked the confidence to write in it.
Then, she did it anyway, developing what she describes in the Afterword to this book as “my effort at a literary, lyrical Scots”. The breakthrough was, perhaps, to defy any notion of linguistic purity; she unearthed old words in dictionaries and combined them with, for example, phrases overheard on the bus. The more she wrote, the more her aptitude with the language developed. This remarkable collection is the result.
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Hide AdMany of the subjects here are familiar from her other work: nature, the seasons, the weather, place, folklore. Her landscapes are tough and windswept rather than soft and pastoral, and she is never sentimental. The eponymous keelie hawk (kestrel) is a bird who can see you even when her back’s turned, but don’t go mistaking that attention for respect.
The poems often begin as descriptions, but Jamie is adept at shifting gears and moving into ideas, memories, feelings, and somehow these shifts feel even easier in Scots. “The Gresses” (The Grasses) begins with description, then the speaker emerges with an invitation: “we’ll sclim the hill and ley doon, imagine we’re awriddy in oor graves”, before delivering their last, devastating, line: “Tae live, we need tae mind hou tae dee.”
Perhaps, as she ponders in the Afterword, it’s because the language is “flying under the radar”. What might feel self-consciously poetic in English has, in Scots, a touch so light it feels like sleight of hand. Even when these poems are dark, which is fairly often, they are rarely doom-laden.
Mortality is a recurring theme, as is the uncanny, surfacing in the midst of the mundane like the sound which wakes you at night “cast frae somewhaur ayont the makkit warld o the fitbaw pitch and B&Q”. Ghosts, dreams and visions dance in the margins, as does the very real fear of climate catastrophe, a future world where glaciers have melted and populations have plummeted.
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Hide AdThe poems are accompanied by English prose translations, a useful support to the reader. I can read Scots reasonably well, but am thrown by occasional unfamiliar words: “pyot” - magpie, “obtemper” - obey, “cranreuch” - frost. The translations are practical but their flatness serves to highlight the rippling, musicality Scots which begs to be read aloud.
The extraordinarily nimble quality of these poems, the dexterity with sound and rhythm, is, of course, due to Jamie’s consummate skill as a poet whichever language she is working in. Yet, in embracing Scots after a lifetime of writing in English, in learning - literally - a new poetic language, she has unlocked a fresh toolbox full of surprises. It was a brave step and this collection is a triumph.
The Keelie Hawk, by Kathleen Jamie, Picador, £12.99
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