Sightlines

I found this book, by a skilled wordsmith best known for her poetry, to be a delightful and rewarding discovery in reading.This collection of essays, contemplations, short memoires, vignettes is never boring. It reveals much of Jamie's relationship to the natural world told through several experiences she has had on what you might call "personal fieldtrips." I particularlly liked the stories about St. Kilda and Ronan, both Scottish Islands that were once inhabitated but later abandoned. The book also offers the benefit to those with little reading time of being in chunks that they can read and savor over a period of weeks or months. I highly recommend this book.

A very different type of travel book - one that follows change through time, birds and whales. It's nice to know there are still writers like her about and I will read more by her.

This book a lovely connection to natural world Hiw important it is to look around us

Interesting writing. Diverse stories. You can pick it up and put it down easily.

Recommended for anyone interested in biology/nature. Poetically and enthusiastically written. I have nothing more to say even though you require 10 more words.

Wonderful sense of the poetics of the natural world in all its forms

A must read

The ability to see detail and then render it precisely with words is a wonderful gift, exercised by Kathleen Jamie in a series of essays about the natural world. In one chapter, she visits a Norwegian museum that proudly displays whale skeletons killed during the golden days of whaling, suspending them in the air from great chains as if the bones are still swimming. In another, she writes simply about the nature of light on the day that it bursts forth proclaiming the transition from winter to spring. With delicacy and grace, she explores the curiosities of her Scottish homeland and invites the reader to join her.I can't decide if the wide range of topics is a strength or a weakness of this book. On the one hand, the variety of topics is great. Every reader will encounter something new. But on the other hand, the book has a certain lack of focus. I love archaeology, so "The Woman in the Field", which describes an excavation that the author participated in during her youth, was interesting and I learned a lot about how to describe the dull work of digging in poetic, engaging terms. But the preceding essay, "Pathologies", when the author tries to come to term with her mother's death by exploring tumors and diseases, managed to bore me so much that I nearly put the book down and walked away. Her essays on St. Kilda, an abandoned village on a tiny island in Scotland, couldn't quite get inside me to impel me to keep reading.And yet...Jamie can describe the colors of the aurora borealis and the biting cold of the frozen north in such a raw, visual way that I truly feel that I see what she sees. The craftsmanship of her sentences is exquisite, and this is all the more noticeable when the essays are read out loud. I want to like it the way I love the nature writing of John Muir, but there's something missing. All those words, words, and words paint a picture but never quite imbue the book with a soul.

This writer-author has a way with words, makes you aware that most of us are missing what is really going on around us. She has a very keen insight and mind that takes you with her on her journeys. Really sharp writing, an observant look at Nature. I made this my post Christmas reading.I bought an ex-library book - it went out 3 times in 2012-13 and was then withdrawn - Why - do we not read anymore ? I consider it my good fortune to have found this writer. I shall look out for more of her writings.I can only repeat what the back cover says; ' the outer world flew open like a door, and I wondered, what is it we're just not seeing '

This is a really rather remarkable book. Normally I would recommend a book on the basis of the majority of its pages. But this one is different.Even if the rest of the book were poor - which it most certainly is not - it would be worth reading Sightlines just for the observation about sheep in a winter landscape. Clearly, I'm not going to tell you what that line is - but it made me stop, put the book down and wonder just how acute your observations would have to be to come up with a line like it.The rest of the book is excellent and just as in Findings, some of the best sections are based indoors rather than outside. Time spent in a pathology lab, and a museum (maybe mortuary?) for whales produced wonderful essays.The prose in the book is neither flamboyant nor self-consciously clever, but it is wonderfully well constructed - there is barely a word out of place, and each one seems to add to the sense of place that this book is about.I cannot recommend this book highly enough - and you may be pleased to know that the line about the sheep come early in the book!

I heard the adaptation of some of these for BBC fours Book of the week. I listen to this on my way to work. It captivated me. I was not dissappointed.Kathleen James love of the wild places and her keen observations really have you sitting right next to her. There are more essays in this book than we heard on the radio, the shortest of which I found to be the most profound. That one is about the day in the year when winter finally releases its hold and spring gets a foot in the door. It's about the change of the quality of light and the air. This is juxtoposed by her rather profound observation of her daughers life stage.If you love wild places. If you want to travel and can't , or you just need a book to take you some place else, then try this. Kathleen is blessed with some amazing opportunities (and a very understanding hubby) and is a wonderful writer. She really knows how to wield a verbal palette and brush to paint the most amazing detailed pictures with very few brush strokes.In some places Kathleen reflects on family life and the different take children have on the world. I too could relate to that.I am really looking forward to reading more of her writting. I ended up buying everything I could find by her. (Her poetry is amazing too.)I suppose I related to this writting so much because I share her love and fascination for the world we live in and the awesome creatures that inhabit it.

.......in a slow food kind of wayI was a expecting a poetry book but got a collection of essays.Such a short book but I learned so much and want to explore so much more.Kathleen Jamie - in that poet's spare, enigmatic way - gives an insight into her background, work, family and nature.I cheered inside to read that she hadn't come from privilege or gone to university but what an indictment on our (their - Scottish?) education system that such a latent talent could pass through school without being recognised, encouraged or nutured.Kathleen made me want to look up words, highlight phrases like 'the wind would catch it and send up plumes of rainbow', go beyond 60 degrees latitude, see the aurora borealis, visit the Hval museum, go to remote islands and more.Her discussions about death and family resonated . By chance, at the same time, I was reading 'Supersense' by Bruce Hood and it's uncanny how Kathleen Jamie reflects the very topics in that book. Can we feel the spirit of land or animals like an echo from the past?He didn't ask me to but I felt jealous on her husband's behalf at the intimacies of friendship described by Kathleen and of the access that her standing gives her and was positively exhilarated by her description of chasing killer whales around an island!And all this with words - phew!

This is a collection of memoirs. Indeed it is largely about her travels around the northern and western isles of Scotland, punctuated by visits to an un-named cave in Iberia, and to Bergen where her interest in whale bones seems to have been born. Each vignette is relatively short and well-written, making the book ideal for reading while travelling or lazing on a beach. It can disappoint however, in that the lack of details can leave one standing on the outside of a community, an uninformed observer, still wondering how to stitch with feathers on St Kilda, when and why exploding harpoons were invented, and if, like Hirta, every windy island has double doors at the entrance to houses, and if not, why not? Perhaps space was limited, but I would have enjoyed a more intimate knowledge of the communities, both human and animal that she visited.