Poem Of The Week: 'The Dipper' By Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie’s wonderful, concise poem of winter discloses a sense of freedom and energy in the natural world that might remain concealed to the quotidian observer. Simple descriptive verse, like the taking of a photograph, could not do the eloquence of organic power adequate justice, for the poet’s lyrical antennae pick up unchannelled instinct here, a suggestion in the aether that an untamed symbiosis with nature may be inferred but never fully apprehended.

The dipper’s solitary congress with its habitat is as unknowable as its shamanic dance, but the ‘depth’ of its instinct, the limitless undammability of its voice, transcends the blind purpose of the river; the bird, in the end, is the bridge between two worlds, interpreting an unseen void in the rhyme and half rhyme of ‘supple’ song, and in metaphorical realisations of the element which is its home and muse.