CAIRN, Kathleen Jamie

…and suddenly a crowd of white butterflies was fluttering around me like a shredded contract…

The language of this book took my breath away once every few minutes.

It is a collection of fragments on a handful of themes, wrapped up together with astonishing skill and wit in the final section. The sort of thing that makes me think hard about what I could and should be doing in my own writing, especially here. But “fragments” implies rough edges, and each of these pieces is a carefully, lovingly polished stone. It’s one of a group of books I’ve read this year that could be broadly labelled “women writing about death and the world,” and it can be bleak and it can be wearing on the heart. But it is unforced. It’s an honest rumination on impermanence.

It’s time to move on, toward whatever happens next.

And it is so beautifully written. And it finds pleasure.

From her own dormer window she can reach down to a gutter where she leaves peanuts, and in exchange the jackdaws sometimes bring her silvery gifts, leaving them in the same place. Recently she’s received a 5p piece, a single amber earring and, amazingly, a small coin from Hong Kong. Hong Kong! Where’d they find that, hereabouts? Maybe jackdaws have their own trade routes.

Look at that. Marvellous. And while it can be rueful or even sorrowful, the book never keens, it never reaches to coldly press buttons in your emotions. It has worry, but it wants peace.

In her own words, it is a book of distillations and observations. Expressions of place and of concern. Of what we lose, and maybe of what we need to lose. It’s a little miracle of a thing, and filled with such perfectly weighted and jewelled sentences it makes me ashamed to have ever gone near a keyboard.

CAIRN (UK) (US+)