Forms in Motion: The Poetic Prose of Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines the use of poetic prose in recent non-fiction by Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie. Drawing on selected chapters from Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Jamie’s Sightlines (2012), and a prose poem from Jamie’s The Bonniest Companie (2015), it demonstrates the hybridity of contemporary nature writing by paying attention to the works’ transgressions of the bounds of verse and prose. After introducing the nineteenth-century debate on differences between lyric and prosaic language and outlining Romantic efforts to poeticize prose descriptions of nature and environment, the article discusses Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s role in this conversation. I argue that formal transgressions – evident in metrical and rhyming effects, typographical experiments, imagery, and allusion – are especially strong in passages that describe movement: in accounts of walking or in observations of the shifting motions of light and weather. Prose forms that approximate and integrate lyricism here enhance a sense of transience as well as exhibit the continuity of human and non-human worlds. Self-consciously tracing the footsteps of other poets who have traversed genre boundaries, Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s work establishes nature writing as a form that is persistently on the move.