Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2012.
The Overhaul is Kathleen Jamie's first collection since the award-winning The Tree House, and it broadens her poetic range considerably. The Overhaul continues Jamie's lyric enquiry into the aspects of the world our rushing lives elide, and even threaten. Whether she is addressing birds or rivers, or the need to accept loss, or sometimes, the desire to escape our own lives, her work is earthy and rigorous, her language at once elemental and tender. As an essayist, she has frequently queried our human presence in the world with the question 'How are we to live?' Here, this is answered more personally than ever.
Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her poetry collection The Tree House (Picador, 2004), won both the Forward Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead was shortlisted for the 2003 International Griffin Prize. Kathleen Jamie’s non-fiction books include the highly regarded Findings and Sightlines. She is Chair of Creative Writing at Stirling University, and lives with her family in Fife.
