Surfacing

I found this book in a donut shop in Arlington, VA, where I spent most of early 2020 before my dad died in March. It caught my eye in their lending library because Jamie has won a John Burroughs Medal, and I was partway through “The Song of Trees,” for which Haskell won a JB Medal, as well, and I've really been enjoying environmental non-fiction. My star rating doesn't totally reflect my emotional experience with this book: there was something oddly soothing reading a poet's prose about Neolithic ruins while bearing witness to someone's death, and this book was one I could come back to throughout this year without losing the connection to the story despite significant lapses in time. There are times that I think Jamie came close to exoticizing her subjects (the book includes passages about Alaska, a Tibetan town in China, and Scotland), but I think she recognized and addressed that tendency relatively successfully by the book's end, and she has a great deal of compassion for the world, both human and everything else.