Storm Bebet
Hid’s blowin a hoolee, bit I geed oot a luk efter dinner wae the camera. A job tae stand apace long enough tae tak photos.
The urge to explore and celebrate all the kinds of lives of Planet Earth is stronger than ever, but the environmental and ecological crisis demands we also lift our eyes, and our voices, to species extinction and habitat loss, to what is happening to the forests and hills, the rivers and seas, our streets and gardens. The writer’s instinct to pay attention has never been more vital. Literature can help us to see the natural world – and our place in it – differently.
Hid’s blowin a hoolee, bit I geed oot a luk efter dinner wae the camera. A job tae stand apace long enough tae tak photos.
What are we searching for, really, when we search for cowries? Out on the skerries, the four of us are bent double.
Sun baked; desiccated husks hung on the fence amid a dwindling vulpine aroma. Their eyes had long gone, and the spark vanished, leaving empty sockets.
Out of sync with the tides. Out of sync with the season. Out of sync with the sudden drop down to the beach.
A fresh-cut blade of summer grass
blows into the book. The seed head
trembles as it slices the print.
The sea gooseberry is not a fruit. But when I first see one, I don’t know what it is at all.
Jamie’s latest collection, Cairn, refuses to be about any one thing. Hillsides, are graced with tormentil and turbines. A tanker carries oil through Glen Esk.
When I was tree I believed
we’d stand forever, sighing
consorts of wind and rain
– till the Felling came,
The Splendid Poison Frog,
Spix’s Macaw,
the Bramble Cay Melomy,
the Moorean Tree Snail,