Waterlight: Selected Poems

The first U.S. publication of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, author of The Tree House, winner of the 2004 Forward Prize for best poetry collection

It isn't mine to give.
I can't coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.
―from "The Dipper"

For more than twenty years, Kathleen Jamie has been writing the poetry that has established her as "the leading Scottish poet of her generation" (The Sunday Times). Lyrical and meditative, her poems engage the natural world and human society with an authentic, earthly spirituality.

Waterlight at last makes Jamie's work available to American readers. Her poetry―rendered sometimes in the Scots dialect, sometimes in the descriptive bursts of a naturalist's field guide ―confronts gender, sex, landscape, and nationhood with the vivacity of an essential poetic voice.