
Best Scottish Poems 2005 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Kathleen Jamie

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

The Glass-hulled Boat

First come the jellyfish:
mauve-fringed, luminous bowls
like lost internal organs,
pulsing and slow.

Then in the green gloom
swaying sideways and back
like half-forgotten ancestors
– columns of bladderwrack.

It's as though we’re stalled in a taxi
in an ill-lit, odd
little town, at closing time,
when everyone's maudlin

and really, ought just to go
home, you sorry inclining
pillars of wrack, you lone,
vaguely uterine jellyfish

– whom I almost envy:
spun out, when our engines churn,
on some sudden new trajectory,
fuddled, but unperturbed.

Source

From The Tree House (London: Picador, 2004).
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Author's note

...But really, what provokes poems, all poems, is the curious business of being in the world. We’re conscious, intelligent and organic, so how are we to live? How are we to conduct ourselves? Why does the world meet us with beauty and wonder? Why is there evil? What is our right response to stupidity and greed, especially our own? Will a poem about a flower suffice?

A tree house is a place where nature and culture meet, a sort of negotiated settlement, part reverie, part domestic, part wild. The book’s epigraph is from Hölderlin. The world may, or may not, be ending its lyric phase, but despite everything, ‘it is beautiful to unfold our souls and our short lives’.

Note: These are the closing two paragraphs from an essay by Kathleen Jamie about her collection The Tree House, from which the above poem is taken. To read the full text of the essay, please follow the link below to her St Andrews University page.

Editor's comment

Notice how near-rhyme is set up in the first two stanzas but not sustained – as the poem says, this really is a seascape that is a little bit drunken, where action soon seems hardly worth the effort; where the last stanza’s 'churn' and 'perturbed' can only rhyme in a befuddled wrong-consonant sort of way. I’m not so sure 'whom' is a word that much exists now except on paper but the lapse into archaic diction somehow over formalises the poem, again in a slightly squiffy and so highly appropriate way.

Biography

Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her poetry collections to date include The Tree House (Picador 2004), which won both the Forward prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award, and Jizzen (Picador 1999), which won the Geoffey Faber Memorial Award. Her travel book about Northern Pakistan, Among Muslims, was published by Sort Of Books in 2002, and a new non-fiction book Findings appeared in 2005. A part-time Reader in Creative Writing at St Andrews University, Kathleen Jamie lives with her family in Fife.