Skip to content

Scottish Poetry Library

Register/Sign in
Shopping Bag Shopping Bag
Bringing people and poems together
  • Home
  • COVID-19
    • Re-Opening FAQ
  • Poetry
    • Poems
    • Poets
    • Our National Poet
    • Podcasts
    • Best Scottish Poems
    • Poetry and Mindfulness
    • Champions 2020
    • Posters
    • Publishers
  • Library
    • Become a borrower
    • Catalogue
    • Collections
    • Ask a librarian
    • Copyright enquiries
  • Learning
    • National Poetry Day 2019
    • National Poetry Day archive
    • SQA set texts
    • Learning resources
    • New to poetry?
    • Advice for poets
  • Events
    • Calendar
    • Exhibitions
    • Venue hire
    • List an event
  • Shop
    • National Poetry Day 2020
    • New Titles
    • Poetry Pamphlet Cards
    • Pocket Poets
    • Scottish Poetry
    • Help
  • About us
    • Our story
    • Our people
    • Our projects
    • Jobs
    • Our building
    • FAQs
    • Find us
  • Support us
    • Become a Friend
    • Donate
    • Easy Fundraising
  • Blog
Shopping BagShopping Bag
Ask a librarian
  • Home
  • >
  • Poetry
  • >
  • Kathleen Jamie
  • >
  • The Glass-hulled Boat
Donate Donate icon Ask a Librarian Ask a Librarian icon

The Glass-hulled Boat

Kathleen Jamie

First come the jellyfish:
mauve-fringed, luminous bowls
like lost internal organs,
pulsing and slow.

Then in the green gloom
swaying sideways and back
like half-forgotten ancestors
– columns of bladderwrack.

It’s as though we’re stalled in a taxi
in an ill-lit, odd
little town, at closing time,
when everyone’s maudlin

and really, ought just to go
home, you sorry inclining
pillars of wrack, you lone,
vaguely uterine jellyfish

– whom I almost envy:
spun out, when our engines churn,
on some sudden new trajectory,
fuddled, but unperturbed.


Kathleen Jamie

from The Tree House (London: Picador, 2004)

Reproduced by permission of the author.

Tags:

21st century poems Best Scottish Poems 2005 scottish poems seaweed

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2005. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2005 was Richard Price.

Editor’s comment: 
Notice how near-rhyme is set up in the first two stanzas but not sustained – as the poem says, this really is a seascape that is a little bit drunken, where action soon seems hardly worth the effort; where the last stanza’s ‘churn’ and ‘perturbed’ can only rhyme in a befuddled wrong-consonant sort of way. I’m not so sure ‘whom’ is a word that much exists now except on paper but the lapse into archaic diction somehow over formalises the poem, again in a slightly squiffy and so highly appropriate way.

Author’s note:
…But really, what provokes poems, all poems, is the curious business of being in the world. We’re conscious, intelligent and organic, so how are we to live? How are we to conduct ourselves? Why does the world meet us with beauty and wonder? Why is there evil? What is our right response to stupidity and greed, especially our own? Will a poem about a flower suffice?

A tree house is a place where nature and culture meet, a sort of negotiated settlement, part reverie, part domestic, part wild. The book’s epigraph is from Hölderlin. The world may, or may not, be ending its lyric phase, but despite everything, ‘it is beautiful to unfold our souls and our short lives’.

Note: These are the closing two paragraphs from an essay by Kathleen Jamie about her collection The Tree House, from which the above poem is taken.

Share this
Facebook
Twitter
Email

Learn more

Best Scottish Poems 2005

The second issue of Best Scottish Poems, edited by Richard Price.
Find out more

Kathleen Jamieb.1962

Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and travel writer. She has been Professor of Poetry at the University of Stirling since 2010.
More about Kathleen Jamie

Podcasts

Our audio programme of poets, poems and news for you to listen to.
Listen Now
  • Newsletter signup
  • Accessibility
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Scottish Poetry Library
5 Crichton's Close, Canongate
Edinburgh EH8 8DT
Tel: +44 (0)131 557 2876
© Scottish Poetry Library 2021.
The Scottish Poetry Library is a registered charity (No. SCO23311).
City of Edinburgh logo Green Arts Initiative logo Creative Scotland logo
By leaves we live

The Scottish Poetry Library is staffed weekdays from 10am – 2pm and is providing a limited service including postal loans and Click & Collect. For details, click COVID-19 in the menu bar above. Dismiss