Jizzen

Kathleen Jamie's Jizzen - old Scots for childbed - explores the transformative power of birth, both human and political.These poems unfold with a supernatural intensity, alternately dark and celebratory, that set them apart from other treatments of the subject. Through the perspectives of emigrant and native, critic and intimate, Jamie addresses Scotland in all its living complexity.Jizzen reveals a writer coming into poetic maturity just as her nation begins to fully assume its own identity. The result is a poetry both worldly and other-worldly, remarkable it its humanity, political sophistication and lyric authority.PRAISE FOR KATHLEEN JAMIE"With The Queen of Sheba Kathleen Jamie has produced the best individual collection of poems by a woman living in twentieth-century Scotland. The book establishes her eminence among Scottish poets of her generation . . . The precision and resource of her language have never been combined more impressively than here" Robert Crawford, Scotsman