Polly Clark reviews: The Tree House by Kathleen Jamie

For Kathleen Jamie, nature may be vast, mysterious and immovable but it is not for her a violent place. This is a book of (mostly) nature poems which give tentative, feminine voices to natural objects, such as trees and flowers, and what those voices reveal is, above all, a kind of gentleness, and a preoccupation with how best to live. Even predators, such as a basking shark or a falcon, are glimpsed in moments of quiet: in 'Basking Shark' the creature lies 'steady/as an anvil' far below the clifftop where the poet stands. It is the water finally which takes the creature away, rather than it swimming back to sea: 'far below the surface glittered, and broke up'. In 'Falcon' the newly fledged bird 'seeks reassurance' and 'in retreat/he becomes almost invisible'. In these poems Jamie seeks out vulnerable moments in nature and brings them to the fore; animals and trees are not symbols for something else, but speak in voices which might be their own.

In Jamie's world, people provide the violence: in 'Frogs' it is a car that ends the carefully detailed scene of two frogs mating. In this poem Jamie concentrates on the moment before the car finally crushes the frogs, bringing into relief a moment of life before death, shrinking the reader to frog-level before pulling back the camera at the last to human-level with its weight of comprehension.

Camera angles, sly perspectives, sweeping changes of view are a central element of these poems. In 'The Wishing Tree' Jamie's camera is a magic one that can begin outside, looking in, then move gradually inside, bringing with it snatches of history and of emotions. From inside the camera can look outwards again, seeing its own living form from a new perspective. In 'White-Sided Dolphins' real cameras are employed by the poet, but it is what they cannot capture that fills the poem, and the poet sees herself in the eyes of the dolphins who, camera-like, 'appraise us/ with a speculative eye' before disappearing away from the boat.

Occasionally the reader might wish for a little variety in the vision of nature, a little edge perhaps, a sense of the living and the dying that goes on without us. But this perhaps is the nature poetry that is left to us in a time of scientific knowledge, of endangered habitats and lost mystery. The creatures and trees of Jamie's poems sense their vulnerability, we view them not as powerful and unknown but somehow out of place and time. These poems are not celebrations of nature, for it is too fragile and vanishing a thing to be celebrated. These are poems about rarity: the rarity of moments where the human can encounter nature truly as it is.

In her poems, Jamie is seeking perfection. There are no wasted words, each poem appears as clearly as it can in as few words as possible. In the poem 'The Fountain of the Lions' she describes a poem that might indeed be one of her own: 'a praise-poem hymns/ the difficult, perfect // system'. But these are not spiritual poems in the way nature poems sometimes are. Jamie is seeking neither God nor 'one-ness' with nature, but a way to be with nature, a perfect moment of coexistence.

The Tree House (Picador) £8.99

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.