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    Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World
    Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World
    Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World
    Audiobook5 hours

    Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World

    Written by Kathleen Jamie

    Narrated by Ruth Urquhart

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie reports from the field-from her native Scottish "byways and hills" to the frigid Arctic in fourteen enthralling essays. She dissects whatever her gaze falls upon-vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, orcas rounding a headland, the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea. In so doing, she questions what, exactly, constitutes "nature," and upends the idea that it is always picturesque. Written with precision, subtlety, and wry humor, Sightlines urges the listener: "Keep looking, even when there's nothing much to see."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 18, 2019
    ISBN9781515941118
    Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for Sightlines

    4.5/5

    70 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Excellent prose on natural world observations.
    • 5/5
      Read this in the right place - a log cabin miles from Roy Bridge, which is miles from anywhere, with a log burning stove and dogs to walk. Borrowed it from the library for holiday reading and will probably have to buy myself a copy although the writing is so sharp that I can almost imagine I know some of the pieces by heart. Every page is interesting and both brings something new and joins it to my own experience.
    • 5/5


      As with all books that are written by poets, this is a delight to read. The language is eloquent and lyrical, without being pretentious.

      She takes us, through a series of essays, on a journey to places in the far north of the UK and Scandinavia. To islands and museums and more importantly to the part of the mind that communicates with nature.

      Well worth reading. Shall be reading some of her other books
    • 5/5
      A luminously reflective book, which brings together some fairly disparate subject matter into a unified whole. Jamie recounts a variety of experiences - an archaeological dig, various trips to remote Scottish islands such as St Kilda and Rona, a visit to a pathology department and an extraordinary section on the Hvalsalen (whale hall) of Bergen museum. She finds startlingly new and perceptive observations on all of these. A memorable and deeply rewarding read.
    • 4/5
      I’ll be honest. The first thing that attracted me to this book when I saw it on NetGalley was the cover. It’s a close up of a whale’s (not sure which kind) eye – it’s like it was made for me! Actually, it looks like Bryant Austin’s work, which is absolutely amazing and should be checked out. (Whoa, just researched and found that the cover image is, in fact, a photo by Austin!)Sightlines is a book of essays about the natural world – at least, it bills itself as such. There were a few in there that I don’t know if I’d necessarily categorize that way, but overall, I think it meets the description. The book started out strong, with an essay about Jamie traveling in Iceland among the icebergs and catching the Aurora Borealis.- "The next iceberg offers to the ship a ramp as smooth and angled as a ski jump. Just slide right up here, little ship, it seems to say, but the invitation is declined."- "Another iceberg, and another. Some people say you can smell icebergs, that they smell like cucumbers. You can smell icebergs and hear your own nervous system. I don’t know. Although they pass slowly and very close, I smell nothing but colossal, witless indifference."I really loved her description of watching the aurora, of the utter silence all around despite the “movement which ought to whoosh.” And the dearth of people despite the awe.- "But: ‘Where is everyone else?’ I whisper. Aside from those few on the deck, the shapes of a few more people can be seen looking out from the windows of the bridge. The bridge, warm and reassuring with its competent officers and glowing green instruments. Where is everyone? My cabin mate clamps her arms to the sides of her goose-down jacket, stands rigid, and whispers in reply, ‘Perhaps they are asleep.’ She smiles as though she’d looked into the human condition some time ago, but has since moved on."The next few essays were a little weird to me, not really my style. But her writing style kept me reading. Jamie is a Scottish author, and her essays are peppered with Scottish and English words – I was glad I was reading this on my Kindle because it was so easy to look up those unfamiliar words. Surprisingly, most if not all were in the dictionary as well!The essays where she explored islands off the coast of Scotland, following birds, following whales, those were where my attention was piqued. And then the chapter on the Bergen Natural History Museum in which she visits the Hvalsalen – Whale Hall – to see the whale bones was my absolute favorite. I wish I could have been there with her, exploring the museum, climbing the skeletons, helping to clean them. I could almost smell the dust, the musty atmosphere, as I read. I usually try to get my favorite quotes, but I was so engrossed with that chapter that I didn’t stop to do that at all.Overall I really enjoyed this book – it turned out different than I expected but that wasn’t a bad thing. If I had to describe it in one phrase, I’d call it natural history in a book.A few more of my favorite quotes:- "Once, I asked my friend John—half in jest—why we are so driven. By day John counsels drug addicts; by night he is a poet. He wrote back, half in jest: ‘You know, my job isn’t to provide answers, only more questions. Like: why are we not more driven? Consider: the atoms of you have been fizzing about for a bit less than five billion years, and for forty-odd of those years, they’ve been pretty well as self-aware as you. But soon enough they’ll go fizzing off again into the grasses and whatever, and they’ll never, ever know themselves as the sum of you again. That’s it. And you ask me why we’re driven? Why aren’t more folk driven? Whatever are they thinking about?’"- "We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation."- "The henge is gone, the director’s report is available to read, the photos are filed away, the Bronze Age woman’s bones—well, they’re in a cardboard box in a city store. The food vessel is reunited with its sister, and displayed in the National Museum, and has nothing to do with this place, this here."On gannets:- "They held their long beaks at every angle, like—paintings again—those portraits of aristocratic dynastic families, where everyone is elegant and looks into the distance, looks anywhere except at each other."- "It was probably nothing, so I said nothing, but kept looking. That’s what the keen-eyed naturalists say. Keep looking. Keep looking, even when there’s nothing much to see. That way your eye learns what’s common, so when the uncommon appears, your eye will tell you."- "The things we deem worth keeping, that is, as we seem to be the arbiters of so many fates. There are only 4000 blue whales alive now. At the time of their deliverance, the moratorium of the 1960s, we had slaughtered our way through 350,000."- "There was a time—until very recently in the scheme of things—when there were no wild animals, because every animal was wild; and humans were few. Animals, and animal presence over us and around us. Over every horizon, animals. Their skins clothing our skins, their fats in our lamps, their bladders to carry water, meat when we could get it."- "Stuart often said there was no such thing as ‘natural harmony’. It was a dynamic. Populations expand, then crash. Mysterious things happen—catastrophic things sometimes, on the island, everywhere. Nothing stays the same."- "Perhaps if you were some sort of purist, if you carried a torch for ‘the wild’ and believed in a pristine natural world over and beyond us, you might consider it an intrusion to catch a bird, and make it wear a ring or a tag. Perhaps you’d consider that their man-made burden violates them in a way. I admit there was something uncomfortable about the metal ring, soldiering on while the bird’s corpse withered. But when I got the chart out, traced the route, measured the distance, and understood that yes, of course, on a southwest bearing, you could swoop via certain channels from the North Sea through to the Atlantic, on small dark wings, it was because this one ringed bird had extended my imagination. The ring showed only that it was wedded to the sea and, if anything, the scale of its journeyings made it seem even wilder than before."Note: I received a review copy of this book from NetGalley. Quotes may be subject to change in the final version.
    • 5/5
      Another delight, but rather different from Findings. This explores places farther afield from Fife where much of Findings was based, including Bergen and St. Kilda, and also delves into some of Jamie's past experiences on archaeological digs. The short St. Kilda series is fascinating, but the essay on Bergen University Natural History Museum's Hvalsal, or Whale Hall, is a masterpiece.