Collected's 24in24 - Jessica recommends... Cairn - Kathleen Jamie

Jessica recommends... An exquisite collection of essays/fragments/poems musing on our place here on earth, and its fragile and precarious state. The prose is carefully crafted and you find yourself stopping to absorb what she has to say. Jamie is known as a poet and nature writer, but this collection defies convention and will appeal to anyone who looks at the world and wonders what it has in store for the generations to come.

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Cairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers.

For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape. The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive.

Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.

Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.