Antlers of Water

Description

'Luminous' The Times'Beautiful' Caught by the RiverBringing together contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens, through prose, poetry and photography. Edited and introduced by Kathleen Jamie, and with contributions from Amy Liptrot, Jim Crumley, Chitra Ramaswamy, Malachy Tallack, Amanda Thomson and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.

Sujets

• Escocia
• Natural history
• Scotland

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 06 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786899804
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Kathleen Jamie is an award-winning Scottish poet and essayist, and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling. Her writing is rooted in Scottish landscape and culture, as shown in her acclaimed essay collections Findings , Sightlines and Surfacing . Her award-winning poetry collections include The Tree House and The Bonniest Companie . In 2018, Jamie was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She lives in Scotland. @KathleenJamie | kathleenjamie.com
Also by Kathleen Jamie
Poetry
Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980–1994
The Tree House
The Overhaul
The Bonniest Companie
Selected Poems
Non-fiction
Among Muslims: Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan
Findings
Sightlines
Surfacing
  
 
The paperback edition published in 2021 by Canongate Books First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH 1 1 TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Copyright © the individual contributors, 2020
The right of the editor and contributors to this collection to be identified as the authors and illustrators of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 981 1 eISBN 978 1 78689 980 4
The publisher acknowledges support from the National Lottery through Creative Scotland towards the publication of this title
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Getting the Hang of the Wind
CHRIS POWICI
Native
JIM CARRUTH
The Wasps’ Byke
JACQUELINE BAIN
Bones of the Forth
GAVIN FRANCIS
The Lurgies
LESLEY HARRISON
Three Meditations on Absence in Nature and Life
CHITRA RAMASWAMY
Lunar Cycling
LINDA CRACKNELL
Plastic Megaliths
HAYDEN LORIMER
Signs for Alva
DAVID JAMES GRINLY
Littoral Rising
GERRY LOOSE
A Handful of Talons
JIM CRUMLEY
I Da Welk Ebb
JEN HADFIELD
What We Talk About When We Talk About Solastalgia
MALACHY TALLACK
Mòinteach Leòdhais: the Lewis Moorland
ANNE CAMPBELL
From Ben Dorain: A Conversation with a Mountain
GARRY MACKENZIE
Around Some Islands
AMANDA THOMSON
Northern Raven
SALLY HUBAND
The Ruling Class
JESS SMITH
At Diarmaid’s Grave
DOUGIE STRANG
Find the Ground
KARINE POLWART
The Bog-Eye of the Human
EM STRANG
From A Place-Aware Dictionary
ALEC FINLAY
Swimming Away from My Baby
AMY LIPTROT
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Introduction
KATHLEEN JAMIE
A ntlers of Water is a collection of specially commissioned writing which concerns our relationship with the more-than-human world. It announces a ‘new Scottish nature writing’ and brings together, for the first time, a fine selection of our country’s hugely talented contemporary nature and environmental writers. It features prose and poetry which is by turns personal, celebratory, political, frightened and hopeful. All the writers in this book are alive in this difficult moment; all reside, or have resided, in Scotland; and all are writing here about some aspect of the country they call home. Their work addresses the realities of our times, and examines our relationship with our fellow creatures, our beloved and fast-changing landscapes, our energy futures, our ancient past.
We talk about a ‘new’ Scottish nature writing, but of course Scottish nature writing is far from new. There is a long tradition: birds animate the ancient ballads, often bringing messages, as they do still. In 1785 Robert Burns famously addressed the mouse whose nest he’d accidentally destroyed, and Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s hymn to Ben Dorain and its deer was also composed in that century. Much-loved classics of nature writing have featured Scottish landscapes, like Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water and Nan Shepherd’s (vastly different) The Living Mountain . Our own title Antlers of Water is taken from Norman MacCaig’s mid-twentieth-century poem ‘Looking Down on Glen Canisp’. We have always shown kind attention to our land and its non-human creatures; we have sung and painted and photographed our extraordinarily beautiful country. But what is different about the twenty-first century, what makes our nature writing ‘new’, is our increasing awareness of unfolding ecological crisis.
The idea lingers of Scotland as a place of lochs and bens and faraway islands, a wild and romantic place where one may forget our human travails. Even if that was once true, it is not now. There can be no one who has not heard of climate change, which we now see rapidly changing the world around us; no one unaware of the mounting levels of threat facing wildlife through habitat loss and want of food; no one can be unaware of ocean plastic and chemical pollution. Our writers are fully cognisant of environmental crisis, they don’t pretend it’s not happening, but they are not prophets of doom. Twenty-one writers and two visual artists were asked to contribute to this book; all responded at once, with great enthusiasm. All responded, I believe, out of love of the world, and our particular part of it. They are not offering escapism. They know it is not possible nowadays to ‘escape’ into nature, and find temporary relief from some other ‘real’ world – far from it. The natural world, the world which birthed us and sustains us, is where the biggest and most frightening changes are happening. What the writers in this volume are doing, in their very different ways, is meeting the challenge of finding a way of speaking and writing, witnessing and celebrating as they continue to love the world, its landforms and plants and creatures, even as we navigate a crisis. The natural world is not here as a painted backdrop to our human concern: it is our human concern.
So our writers are aware of global issues, but also, whether they like it or not, they are familiar with Scotland’s peculiarities: its tourist appeal and lingering Romanticisation; its ongoing tension between economic exploitation and conservation; its chronic issues around land ownership and dispossession; its restive political situation; its vast, beautiful coastline; its infamous weather. Some of the writers within are capable of great physical feats of walking and endurance; others live lives more circumscribed. We have writing from the mothers of newborns and toddlers, mothers railing against the inequality their daughters are still subjected to. We have fathers alarmed by the damage nuclear waste is laying down in the environment, into their children’s future. Indeed, the range of concerns is as various as Scotland itself, from uninhabited island to tenement block, from rockpool to eagle’s flight, from red deer to pigeons. We present traditional prose through song to experimental poetry, but what all the writers share is an attentiveness . They have chosen to foreground the natural world, in some way, in their work. As Hugh MacDiarmid said, ‘Scotland, small?’
Recent years have seen a renaissance of so-called ‘nature writing’ throughout the English-speaking world. There are shelves in bookshops where before there were none, literary prizes, specialist journals. Many of the books which fill those ‘Nature and Environment’ shelves are made in Scotland, and individual Scottish writers have been at the forefront of that wider movement, but, we ask, is there an identifiably Scottish new nature writing? Writers from all over the country were invited to contribute to this book. Not all were born here, many have chosen to live here, or found themselves obliged to. Some are well established as writers, having held their own as nature writers before its recent celebration. Others are just beginning. Their work arrived from Shetland, Sutherland, Perthshire, the Inner Hebrides, an Edinburgh tenement, the fields of Angus, the semi-militarised Firth of Forth, the woods of Galloway. But is there an identifiably S cottish streak to their work?
There’s certainly a language. Readers might discover some Scots words they did not know before, but if there is a Scottish attitude to our own country, well, that is for readers to decide. I would only point out that in this book, the words ‘wild’ and ‘wilderness’ rarely occur. It’s not our daily lived experience of our own land. What the writers observe is the intersection of modernity and nature in a rapidly changing Scotland. Wind turbines, housing schemes, wee back gardens – such is the Scottish environment we know. Many of the writers live in urban settings: most Scots do. We have been largely removed from the land and, despite a few community buy-outs, our experience of our own land and nature is not one of ownership, certainly not of the landscapes that feature on calendars. It’s only in recent years that our right to roam or wild-camp has been established, but, as this book shows, you don’t have to wild-camp to be an eco-poet. We have space, but the ‘wild’ is actually hard to find. Human intervention is everywhere. Yes, there are sea-eagles, but their re-introduction is the result of human political and conservation activity (as the absence of raptors is so often the result of human greed and cruelty). There are expansive peat-moors; there are also wind farms. There are rugged Atlantic shorelines, but they are littered with plastic trash. The writers in this book do not pretend Scotland is pristine; rather, they engage knowledgeably with its culture and history, and, crucially, its future. Ancient life-ways are acknowledged, lingering in place-names and archaeological sites, but certain so-called ‘traditions’ are briskly challenged. There is eco-anxiety, ‘solastalgia’, feminism; there are the ruins of capitalist endeavour. There is also plenty of space (habitat?) for our fellow creatures, from stags to barnacles, which share our ‘Sco