- 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
Form in The Tree House
Form in The Tree House
- Chapter:
- (p.103) 10. Form in The Tree House
- Source:
- Kathleen Jamie
- Author(s):
Michael O’Neill
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
This chapter discusses the use and workings of form in Kathleen Jamie’s The Tree House. It explores how she balances the claims of modernity and tradition, how she deploys an idiom that combines dialect, the demotic and the literary. It argues that the volume’s use of form is in contact with what in one poem is called ‘the common currency’ of human experience. It maintains that the volume’s handling of form shows Jamie’s awareness that any meanings derived from nature have, at least in part, to be meanings conferred upon it. The chapter also discusses Jamie’s ability to interweave motifs and themes on the volume, and it looks at the intermittent, productive tension between grand assertions at the close of poems and the seeming fragility of poetic form as a vehicle for larger resonances. It concludes by affirming that, in the volume, form is a mode of self-aware and resourceful attention.
Keywords: Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House, form, sonnet, couplets, nature, mind, self-awareness, dialect
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