The Bonniest Companie

By Kathleen Jamie

In her extraordinary collection, Kathleen Jamie examines her native Scotland - a country at once wild and contained, rural and urban - and her place within it. In the author's own words: '2014 was a year of tremendous energy in my native Scotland, and knowing I wanted to embrace that energy and participate in my own way, I resolved to write a poem a week, and follow the cycle of the year.' The poems also venture into childhood and family memory - and look to ahead to the future.

The Bonniest Companie is a visionary response to a year shaped and charged by both local and global forces, and will stand as a remarkable document of our times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781509801701

Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her poetry collection The Tree House (Picador, 2004), won both the Forward Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead was shortlisted for the 2003 International Griffin Prize. Her most recent collection, The Overhaul, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2012 and won the Costa Poetry Award 2012. Kathleen Jamie’s non-fiction books include the highly regarded Findings and Sightlines. She is Chair of Creative Writing at Stirling University, and lives with her family in Fife.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

MERLE

The Shrew

Take me to the river, but not right now,

not in this cauld blast, this easterly

striding up from the sea

like a bitter shepherd –

and as for you, you Arctic-hatched, comfy-looking geese

occupying our fields,

you needn’t head back north anytime soon –

snow on the mountains, frozen ploughed clods –

weeks of this now, enough’s enough

– but when my hour comes,

let me go like the shrew

right here on the path: spindrift on her midget fur,

caught mid-thought, mid-dash

Glacial

A thousand-foot slog, then a cairn of old stones –

hand-shifted labour,

and much the same river, shining

way below

as the Romans came, saw,

and soon thought the better of.

Too many mountains, too many

wanchancy tribes

whose habits we wouldn’t much care for

(but could probably match),

too much grim north, too much faraway snow.

Let’s bide here a moment, catching our breath

and inhaling the sweet scent of whatever

whin-bush is flowering today

and see for miles, all the way hence

to the lynx’s return, the re-established wolf’s.

Merle

Thon blackbird in the briar

by the outfield dyke

doesn’t know he’s born

doesn’t know he’s praise and part

of this Sabbath forenoon

north-Atlantic style.

From his yellow beak his song descends

to the year’s first celandines;

his throat patters. With a yellow claw

he scarts his left lug

Soon the haar will burn off

revealing the Rum Cuillin

happed in March snow, and the waters of the Minch

but for