Coming up to the surface

The notion of long-buried things seeing the light of day again is a theme in this recent prose collection of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie’s, encapsulated in its title – artefacts tumbling out of the melting permafrost, pottery fragments surfacing in a ploughed field, miners surfacing from a mine, a grandmother surfacing after depression, memories surfacing after decades, old ways of doing things surfacing in our plastic-proliferated present.