With "Cairn," Kathleen Jamie paints a strong nature

With or without her binoculars, Kathleen Jamie always has to get out. She leaves the city to go to the hills to see the state of the springs, she slips away from home to pitch her tent by the Allt Na Maddy ('the wolf's river'), she goes to watch curlews in a bog, or, another day, picks up 'a mermaid's purse' on the beach, which contains skate eggs. Then she goes up to sit on top of the cliff against a cairn, 'the perfect place to stop and look'. Cairn is the name of her new collection. It is not a poetry collection – Jamie was recently 'national poet' of Scotland – but it does contain a few poems. It is not quite a collection of what the Anglo-Saxons call essays, that is, literary non-fiction, like the wonderful ones in The Horizon (