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In her new book the poet Kathleen Jamie explores our fascination with (and our difficulty) with understanding deep or geological time. ‘Surfacing’ (Sort of Books) is a collection of essays which is rooted in archaeological digs in Alaska and in Orkney. Kathleen’s engagement with archaeology began when she was a teenager and it reminds her that people living in the past were just as ‘vital’ as us – and just like us, were living on the edge of their own futures. All of Kathleen’s non-fiction writing and poetry asks what happens if we really look at the world around us. She explains to Ian why the act of paying attention can also be an act of resistance. Kathleen Jamie is Professor of Poetry at the University of Stirling; her ‘Selected Poems’ and her most recent collection, ‘The Bonniest Companie’, are published by Picador

In Denise Riley’s Forward Prize winning poem ‘Part Song’ and her essay ‘Time Lived, Without Its Flow’, Denise considers how our perception of time is altered by grief, which also leads her to reflect on how we normally experience time. For Denise, mourning seemed to put her outside of time’s flow and as result she found it difficult to write – to build a narrative. Denise also reads from her ‘Selected poems’, which has just been published, and considers the freedom of poetic restrictions, the poetic ‘I’, and the contradictions of being a poet who wants to both stand in front of and hide behind poems. She also shares two new poems, one of which can be heard on the Verb podcast.  ‘Time Lived, Without its Flow’ has just been republished by Picador, who also publish Denise’s poetry.