Surroundings and soundings

Environment: Kathleen Jamie started travelling early, setting off at 19 with a poetry-writing award to the Near East and Himalayas, then Tibet. Her first travel writings were collected and reissued in 2002 as Among Muslims, a timely and well-received book.

She has been a leading figure in the renaissance of Scottish poetry, sometimes caught up in political or feminist issues and often using a vigorous Scots diction to swing a line along: "Whit dae birds write on the dusk?/A word niver spoken or read".

There's not a line of her own poetry in Findings (though much of the book, of course, can't help but offer near-as-dammit cadences and images) and little enough personal context. It's as if she's afraid her poetry might get in the way of her undoubtedly subversive purpose, which is to make us to look harder at our surroundings and knit more connections with them - "paying heed", as she puts it. As for Scots, the odd word does creep in, but to "pleuter about" on the shore needs no rendering.

Her travels don't wander exotically far. Some are domestic and consciously wifely: "Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that's how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in the traffic, oyster-catchers. In the school playground, sparrows . . ." She attends to the peregrines screaming on the cliff above her home in Fife, sorting their concerns from the roar of fighter jets; ospreys and buzzards, a rare, hang-gliding crane, heighten the tensions in the sky. "The birds live at the edge of my life. That's okay. I like the sense that the margins of my life are semi-permeable."

But much of the book is excursionary, mostly to a landscape which lovers of the west of Ireland will find wonderfully familiar - "rough moor knuckled with bedrock" and solitary beachcomber's strands where the sand-polished skull of a gannet, a bleached whale's scapula, the severed head of a blue-eyed doll, offer challenging intimations. But here again, Jamie roots her images in the everyday: geese take off "strung out like lines of washing". And a climb to a glen in the hills to find the ruins of shielings - booley huts in the Irish context - is made remarkable by an atmosphere created by precise, direct language. The intimate feel of this high place on a summer's day, "out in the hills on my own", is shaped in the simplest of words (Jamie lectures in creative writing at St Andrew's University).

On the wildflowered machair of the Hebridean Isle of Coll, she unwittingly connects with an Irish concern: the survival of the corncrake ("the nutty noisemaker, the quailie, the weet-my-fit") here in one of its last Scottish refuges. It's an occasion for eco-tourist notes, out at night with the RSPB warden to chart the rasps of 73 calling males. Someone calls them "little gods of the field", which she prefers to science, and by day she sees one at last, enough to picture corncrakes "standing chins up, open-beaked, like votive statues hidden in the grass." There are other set-pieces of this sort. The book opens with a trip to the Orkneys to greet the winter solstice at Maes Howe, a Neolithic chambered cairn. The weather's wrong, as it happens: no revelatory beam of setting sun is there to pierce the tomb. Settling for a meditation on darkness - "the natural, courteous dark" - Jamie blames Christians for giving it a bad name.

Another of her trips is to a salmon research station, on the River Braan, joining people who come to admire the fish leaping up the falls. She takes away uplifting thoughts about heroic persistence, and images of Nijinsky in mid-hover, then is utterly let down to learn that the fish are hatchery-bred and denied any chance of spawning where they might mess up the statistics: their leaps are quite in vain.

Much odder, at first glimpse, is the choice of a visit to the Surgeon's Hall in Edinburgh, where portraits of august anatomists look down on jars holding unimaginable, but vitally real, bits and pieces. This is "the world of nature within": Jamie thinks it only proper to reach out to it, even while in tears before a jar of conjoined, enfolded twins.

Perhaps spoiled by familiarity with scenes of the windswept and wild, my own favourite among these pieces finds the author setting up a telescope on Calton Hill in Edinburgh ("a well-known gay cruising area") in order to explore "the secret, modest things half-hid among the roofs, like animals in a forest . . ." Endless iron cockerels, wind vanes, flighted arrows, stars, astrolabes and crosses, a naked, golden Youth - a thicket of symbols offered to the sky above an oblivious citizenry.

Poets, perhaps, have thinner skins to their souls, as well as sharper eyes. But the need to become more alive to the world seems to inform much modern writing in an almost desperate way, sensible of the onrushing ecological crisis. In Ireland, Tim Robinson's avid explorations of the western landscape, as in Stones of Aran, have sought "a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground". Kathleen Jamie is gentler and leaves more between the lines, but her writing, too, is an injunction to start paying heed.

Michael Viney is an Irish Times columnist and author of Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History, published by Blackstaff Press

Kathleen Jamie will read on the opening day of the Dublin Writers' Festival, Thurs, Jun 16, at 1pm in the Project along with Sheenagh Pugh and Carol Rumens