A citizen of the natural world

Kathleen Jamie began her poetry before writing was an industry, and she may have been better off for that, she tells Belinda McKeon

There's a question that Kathleen Jamie can't bear to hear. And these days, more than 20 years into her career as a poet, she's just not entertaining it any more.

"It was, 'do you consider yourself a woman writer or a Scottish writer?' " she recalls, grimacing. "As if you couldn't be both. Those tensions don't drive my work any more, because it was only other people who thought that those were issues that I needed to resolve. I think had I been born at a different time, the pressures would have been different. But because I was born, or came to adulthood, at the time both of the women's movement and of a rising desire for home rule in Scotland, you know, those were the things that were acute when I was a young woman. Simple as that."

And so, the issues in question - those of personal and of national identity - have been defiantly sidelined in Jamie's most recent collection, The Tree House, which last year won the £10,000 Forward Prize. Its poems explore ground which is starkly different, both thematically and stylistically, to her 1994 collection The Queen of Sheba, which probed both Scottish womanhood and Scottishness itself with a sharp wit and an equally sharp tongue, scorning the mean-mindedness and parochialism embedded in both notions. Even her 1999 collection, Jizzen, the title of which derives from the Scots word for childbed, explores notions of place and of identity in a broader, almost universal sense; its poems are of birthing, both of the human and of the nation, and its most tender relationships are between the mother and the child, with the sequence Ultrasound inspired by the first glimpse of a nestling baby, as its startling and beautiful centrepiece.

Fast-forward to The Tree House, and the theme has become utterly human, and concerned with our relationship to the natural world rather than to any politics of nation or gender. "I wish my whole battened/ heart were a property/ like this," she writes in one poem, "with swallows in every room" ("Swallows"), while in another, "The Swallows' Nest" - the only poem she has dedicated to her husband in 10 years of marriage - the birds' "home-made bracket of spittle/ and earth" becomes a symbol for togetherness and ease. These are poems of the earth, of the beings that make their homes on that earth, and no narrow categories, no tunnelled ways of seeing, find place in their expression.

The Tree House may represent a powerful maturity, but Jamie is still a relatively young woman - her prolific output of seven poetry collections and three works of non-fiction might belie the fact that she is still in her early 40s. Born in western Scotland in 1962, she began to publish at a very early age, and her first books of poetry, including Black Spiders (1982) and A Flame in Your Heart (1986), have recently been gathered in a collection ominously entitled Mr And Mrs Scotland Are Dead, along with her other three collections up to 1994.

Having her juvenilia so easily available to her readers doesn't exactly give her a warm feeling inside, she confesses. "If I had my time again, I wouldn't do it," she says. "I'd arrive on the scene at the age of about 33. I feel like I've done all my apprenticeship in public. And other people manage to avoid that." Not that she'd burn the early books, she goes on, but she'd be "happier if they didn't exist".

So how did they come to exist, from a young writer still at university in Edinburgh, with no literary connections, no ready route past the publishers' slush pile so bewailed by others? "There was a publisher in Edinburgh," she recalls, "who announced that he was looking for books, and I lived just around the corner from him. So I took this bundle of poems around and left it on his doorstep, like an abandoned baby. And ran away. In those days, you see, there was no career path, there was nobody to tell me not to do it."

As a lecturer in creative writing at St Andrews University, Jamie now herself occupies the position of guiding aspiring young writers more carefully upon the same path which she so defiantly trod in the early 1980s. Is she nostalgic for a time when writing was not such big business?

"I'm at a summer school at the moment, teaching the inevitable creative writing workshop," she says, "and Mary Morrissy [ the Irish novelist] is here too. And we were just saying that. Writing is an industry now. And we were free of that. And I'm beginning to wonder if we had the better option."

Jamie is reticent in conversation, and practically impossible to draw into discussions of her poems. Neither can she explain the motives that first compelled her to write poetry, as a young teenager growing up on the outskirts of Edinburgh. She read little, had "very unliterary" parents, and laughs at the notion that a book of Robert Burns poems in her childhood home might have been read aloud by the family. Of the Scottish poets of her own generation, such as Don Paterson and Robert Robertson, she says that they are primarily "friends" rather than peers or influences.

She was not in Ireland in November 2002, when a conference on Scottish writing at TCD brought together several of those poets - and happened to come directly after the publication of a controversial article in the London Review of Books by another Scottish writer, novelist Andrew O'Hagan, in which he launched an attack on the bigotry and irresponsibility of the Scottish nation.

"I nearly wrote to the paper," she says, "to say that I didn't recognise the country that he was describing. I live in that country and he doesn't. And then I thought, I couldn't be bothered. He was just stirring it."

Blatantly stirring up issues is something in which Jamie is uninterested, not just in her subtle poetry, but also in her non-fiction and travel-writing, much of which has explored the diverse cultures of the Near East with vividness and understanding. In her recent travelogue, Among Muslims, she writes about the everyday lives of Pakistani women, rather than about their place as cogs in any cultural or political mechanisms; the "sheer ordinariness" of their existence is what catches her poet's eye. "We've got much more in common than you might think," she says. "Motherhood, for example. That bound people much more than anything else. In that what we all had was concern for the kids, anxiety about the elderly parents, about schooling, about keeping going, that mundane stuff."

Her own children, nine-year-old Duncan and seven-year-old Freya, don't make appearances in her poems, at least not in an explicit way, and nor, despite the dedication of The Swallow's Nest, does her husband. "I don't write for other people," she laughs. "You just write the poem that has to be written. If you're pressurised by a thing, it will find its way into the work. Issue poems, you just know not to bother. Because you'll just make a bad poem."

The Dublin Writers Festival begins tomorrow. Kathleen Jamie will read from her work at Project tomorrow at 1pm