Jizzen Book

Although "Jizzen", which means "childbed", may conjure expectations of poems about motherhood, Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie's new collection ranges beyond the home and is much more about the larger theme of survival itself. In "Hackit", a bleak-faced immigrant in Canada tells of surviving hardship and hunger after "the last herring, small as her hand" was gone, while in "Rhododendrons", Jamie imagines the first arrival of the "innocent and rare" plants, "their blooms a hidden gargle / in their green throats" and observes how they've become cherished in Scotland as commonplace and native. The first word of the collection is "remember", the last is "poetry" and in between Jamie extols the balm of stories, the ease of words to soothe loss. She also celebrates the profuse, particular and robust dialect of Scots-English in poems such as "Bairnsang" for her "wee toshie man" and "Lucky Bag". She speaks poignantly of the loss of lore and old uses of language by a people who didn't have to leave to suffer dislocation: "we emigrants of no farewell / who keep our bit language / in jokes and quotes / our working knowledge of coal-pits, fevers, lost." In a wonderfully ironic "Forget It", she writes of learning about the slums where she used to live in history class: "Ours is a long driech / now-demolished street." In the central poem, "Ultrasound", she beckons her unborn son, "sleeping in a bone creel" with a polite hopefulness. "Let's close the door, / and rearrange / the dark, red curtain." Bringing him home, motherhood gives her the need to touch other living things at the top of the garden in "a complicit homage of equals". Other poems such as "Bonaly" in which she boasts of her time as the House three-legged champion and "Mrs McKellar, her martyrdom", show her jaunty comic talent. In "Song of Sunday", survival is simply a matter of getting through the dull day, the "tatties / peeled lovelessly, blinded / pale and drowned." One final poem, "St Bride's" glides deftly and surprisingly from "feathers / of sunlight, glanced from a butterknife / quiver on the ceiling" to the sharp twist that delivers her daughter, "the placenta / following, like a fist of purple kelp." Jamie is hugely enjoyable and has the canny knack of introducing an almost inconsequential pathos among the stark and simple imagery. --Cherry SmythRead More