- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and Citations
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- Inlet
-
1. A Poetics of Listening -
2. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Taking a Vacation in the Autonomous Region - Off the Page
-
3. Kathleen’s Scots -
4. Transcending the Urban: The Queen of Sheba - Hibernaculum
-
5. ‘Proceeding Without a Map’: Kathleen Jamie and the Lie of the Land -
6. ‘An Orderly Rabble’: Plural Identities in Jizzen -
7. ‘Sweet-Wild Weeks’: Birth, Being and Belonging in Jizzen - Even If
-
8. ‘The Tilt from One Parish to Another’: The Tree House and Findings -
9. Repetition, Return and the Negotiation of Place in The Tree House - A Man, a Former Environmental Activist Turned PR Consultant for Logging Companies, Defends His Choices
-
10. Form in The Tree House -
11. Nature and Embodiment in This Weird Estate - What the Water Says
-
12. Into the Centre of Things: Poetic Travel Narratives in the Work of Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd -
13. ‘Connective Leaps’: Sightlines and The Overhaul - To KJ, in her Attic
-
14. Life Lines, Sight Lines: Collaborative Works -
15. Midlife Music: The Overhaul and Frissure -
16. ‘We Do Language Like Spiders Do Webs’: Kathleen Jamie and Michael Longley in Conversation - Notes on Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
Transcending the Urban: The Queen of Sheba
Transcending the Urban: The Queen of Sheba
- Chapter:
- (p.42) 4. Transcending the Urban: The Queen of Sheba
- Source:
- Kathleen Jamie
- Author(s):
Amanda Bell
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
This chapter examines The Queen of Sheba (1984) for evidence of the seeds of Jamie's ecological interests. It focuses on five poems which chart the growth of a female sensibility, from childhood through early parenthood and into independent self-awareness. The poems analysed are ’Mother-May-I’, ‘Child with pillar box and bin bags’, ‘Fountain’, ‘Flashing green man’, and ‘Skeins o Geese’. In these poems, the urban is represented by the constructed human environment and the rules for normative behaviour; the rural by the natural, nonhuman, world outside, best characterised as ’the anti-urban’. The chapter demonstrates how, although usually considered in terms of Scottish identity, The Queen of Sheba marks the first stages of Jamie's interrogation of the place of the human in the world. It concludes that the collection can be seen as a paradigm for the development of an ecopoetics
Keywords: Kathleen Jamie, anti-urban, ecological, ecopoetics, nonhuman, place, The Queen of Sheba
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and Citations
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- Inlet
-
1. A Poetics of Listening -
2. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Taking a Vacation in the Autonomous Region - Off the Page
-
3. Kathleen’s Scots -
4. Transcending the Urban: The Queen of Sheba - Hibernaculum
-
5. ‘Proceeding Without a Map’: Kathleen Jamie and the Lie of the Land -
6. ‘An Orderly Rabble’: Plural Identities in Jizzen -
7. ‘Sweet-Wild Weeks’: Birth, Being and Belonging in Jizzen - Even If
-
8. ‘The Tilt from One Parish to Another’: The Tree House and Findings -
9. Repetition, Return and the Negotiation of Place in The Tree House - A Man, a Former Environmental Activist Turned PR Consultant for Logging Companies, Defends His Choices
-
10. Form in The Tree House -
11. Nature and Embodiment in This Weird Estate - What the Water Says
-
12. Into the Centre of Things: Poetic Travel Narratives in the Work of Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd -
13. ‘Connective Leaps’: Sightlines and The Overhaul - To KJ, in her Attic
-
14. Life Lines, Sight Lines: Collaborative Works -
15. Midlife Music: The Overhaul and Frissure -
16. ‘We Do Language Like Spiders Do Webs’: Kathleen Jamie and Michael Longley in Conversation - Notes on Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index