Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new essays brim with sense and sensibility

There is a moment in one of the longer pieces in Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new collection of essays, when the author trains her binoculars on an animal in the distance. She is on an archaeological dig in Quinhagak, a Yup’ik village in Alaska. Unsure as to what the creature is — perhaps a bear, or perhaps a woman picking berries — she waits for it to move: ‘After long minutes, my woman-or-bear spread two black wings and took to the air. A raven!’ She wonders:

Maybe it showed how readily, in this unfixed place, the visible shifts. Transformation is possible. A bear can become a bird. A sea can vanish, rivers change course. The past can spill out of the earth, become the present.

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It’s just one example of how Jamie marries keen sensory observations with a metaphysical sensibility. Her pared-back prose is alive with complex ideas, not unlike her literary Scottish forebear Nan Shepherd.

‘In Quinhagak’ is one of two long pieces in this collection that revolve around an archaeological dig. In this coastal spot of Alaska, the combination of rising sea levels and melting permafrost has resulted in the exposure of a buried ancient village. Jamie describes how the climate has altered drastically even in the six years of the dig, and quotes the lead archaeologist: ‘It’s like the site’s been towed 500 miles south in just five years.’ Here, and elsewhere in the book, Jamie surveys the damaging effects of the Anthropocene with a steady eye. Though always mindful and mournful of what is being lost, she gives space to what climate change brings to the surface.

She juxtaposes the lives conjured by the 500-year-old artefacts from ‘pre-contact times’, when the Yup’ik ‘were hunter-gatherers and fended for themselves’, with current local habits, such as the enthusiastic consumption of supermarket-bought hot dogs and driving four-wheelers at speed.