Book review: Surfacing, by Kathleen Jamie

Reviewing a collection of essays, the temptation is to review the writer and not the book. What, you wonder, is there to get hold of when you are taken from a “Reindeer Cave” in the West Highlands to Alaska and the edge of the Bering Sea, to a Neolithic site on the Orkney Island of Westray, to the Chinese border with Tibet (entry forbidden), back to Scotland and an ageing father who won’t eat the food his daughters bring him, and then to being lost in a Scottish wood? Easier surely to reflect on Kathleen Jamie the poet and the quality of her good poet’s prose which is never poetic?