... the individual pieces are so artfully arranged to reflect off one another that they form a tightly coherent whole ... Jamie’s ability to conjure a sense of place is astonishing...there’s a risk of believing one has actually been there in person ... But she is also as concerned with excavating human personalities as the archaeologists are concerned with uncovering walrus ivory artifacts. Diggers and local residents appear, fully formed, by way of a few carefully recorded details and fragments of speech ... The impacts of climate change are made explicit without polemicizing. And the personal themes of time’s passing are made universal without the self-obsession that mars some of travel and nature writing’s tales of 'healing journeys' ... As always, Jamie’s deft and subtle handling of her themes is aided by the remarkable quality of the writing itself. She is an acclaimed poet, as well as an author of prose, and her writing here certainly has the meticulous precision of poetry. But its fineness has an elusive, quicksilver quality ... Put together, the whole thing shimmers ... Individual lines, containing individual ideas, come with the force of an unexpected blow, leaving the reader briefly giddy.
It is as if Jamie, wherever she goes, functions as a lightning rod, drawing past, present and future together ... Jamie’s writing has a deceptive simplicity: its powers are cumulative. Her way is to build impressionistic detail by recounting conversations, travels, observations of the natural world, and then carefully layer it in. It is its own kind of archaeology. Every now and then, however, she cuts through the assemblage of beautiful prose with a stinging comment: a reminder that the natural balance is out of whack, or that violence and menace can surface just as easily as venerable artefacts from the past ... Jamie’s apocalyptism is the quiet kind; it is gradual ageing and erosion, and a build-up of 'plastic and waste' that will do us in. But we can also breathe the world in deeply, inhaling a beauty more precious for its fading.
There is unity here. This is not just a collection of pieces thrown together in sufficient number to make a book. Even the one essay that does not immediately seem to have a connection to the others – a marvellous picture of a journey to the edge of Tibet at the time of the Tiananmen Square repression in Beijing – does in fact belong ... This is a beautiful book, and a wise one. It invites feeling and thought.
A fascinating, lyrical, wide-ranging work sharing thoughts on past and present that will appeal to a wide range of readers, including those interested in memoirs and reflections on the world around us.
... a quieter, gentler work than her earlier volumes ... the literary equivalent of the slow food movement: writing that may describe momentous events, but does so in a manner that is sidelong, subtle and requires a degree of readerly patience ... There’s no doubt that this is the work of the same author as those earlier collections, though. First, there’s the quality of the noticing eye, the poet’s ability to look deeply at a landscape, a person, a situation, and then to summon it on the page with what Robert Lowell called 'the grace of accuracy'. Then there’s Jamie’s particular talent for nature writing, the way that she weaves eagles, ragwort, snow buntings, caribou and all the rest of the natural world into her prose so that they lose the otherness that can distance them from our experience. Nature in Jamie’s writing is immediate, domestic and, well, natural ... accretive and, eventually, astonishing ... wonderful writing, testing the limits of nonfiction.
Like the celebrated nature writer Loren Eiseley, who could report on an ancient bison bone and his pet dog in the same breath, bringing the remote record of earlier lives into the warm immediacy of his household, Ms. Jamie connects the relics of distant ages with the daily routines in front of her ... references to climate change in Surfacing sound its softly elegiac tone ... Ms. Jamie appears more gregarious than Thoreau and most other nature writers. While the genre is deeply populated by solitaries, her essays brim with people ... but some of the book’s most memorable essays grow from [Jamie's] native soil in Scotland.
Throughout it all, the reader encounters passages of breathtaking beauty ... though Jamie always finds herself relentlessly tugged away from primordial beauty toward anxieties of the modern world and a looming sense of catastrophe, the immediacy of her surroundings giving way to a geologic sense of time.
... expressive ... [Jamie's] outsider’s gaze is problematic. First she extols the region’s beauty and history, but then she affects wide-eyed surprise at the existence of a local grocery store, regards local foods as exotica, and includes a passage about another white visitor whose assertions about the impact of centuries-old colonialism on modern regional politics are presented as fact rather than out-of-touch opinion ... Overall, an uneven effort with sparks of elegance.
... artfully written, linguistically delicate essays ... Jamie isn’t quite a traditional essayist, but she’s a very fine storyteller ... Mostly, though, Jamie is observant, reflective, and poignant in her prose ... Punctuated by photographs and relatable to any human being who feels a connection to nature, Jamie’s writing is complex yet modest, reflecting on generations past and future, the nature of time, and what to hang on to as well as what to let go ... A beautiful portrait of a fleeting moment in time on planet Earth.
Jamie doesn’t join the chorus of voices calling for immediate action to prevent the effects of climate change from getting worse. She admits to feeling 'powerless to resist' the 'global forces and corporations' blamed for the crisis. She can’t, however, be accused of throwing in with the climate defeatists. Surfacing is a work of cautious optimism, with the author occasionally tilting too far toward wide-eyed hope.
... a lyrical, beautifully rendered collection of essays ... Jamie’s observations about time and the interconnectedness of human lives, past and present, are insightful, and her language elegant. The result is a stirring collection for poetry and prose readers alike.
