"He is really a great person, and the right person to be doing this." What Lot is talking about is printed across the front of his T-shirt, proudly worn under a natty leather jacket and teamed with designer sunglasses The slogan reads simply "The SoHo Synagogue". "Dovi has the vibe," says Eran Lot, leaning against a granite counter-top in the kitchen of a fabulously trendy second-floor loft at 420 West Broadway in Manhattan's SoHo district. It's an address that is also home to the DKNY store and, until recently, a two-level apartment owned the actor Meg Ryan. And the exquisite rendition of small things is an honourable tradition in art and literature: think of Nicholas Hilliard's miniatures, Schubert's lieder, even Faberg? eggs.

But in Kathleen Jamie, it is a talent now crying out to be deployed in ways that might make us weep or wonder, rather than gasp in admiration. It was a Swiss army knife, with a blade only two inches long, and a diving gannet can enter the water at 90mph: they have strong necks. It was early morning, low tide, and I was glad to have the beach to myself."But that trumpet blast subsides, almost as if it has crept in by accident, and melts back into the practised and polished delineation of phenomena which is everywhere on display This is a notable talent. The chamber of a Neolithic tomb has "a thick soundlessness, like a recording studio, or a strongroom". Jamie writes of a peregrine falcon on a rock, "still as stone, like a little votive statue on a high plinth".It is accomplished to a high degree. But one can finish Findings dissatisfied, wishing there was something more; wishing, perhaps, that for all the brilliance of the brushwork, there was a grand design.

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There is hardly any sense in these exquisite miniatures that the world is swept by huge tides, and so are people's hearts, except for one moment when a different note entirely is briefly sounded and your heart starts to race: "I hacked off the gannet's head with my penknife, which turned into one of those jobs you wish you'd never started. Their point is the vivid catching of the fleeting aspects of the world around us, which, by watching in an unusually acute and attentive way, Jamie does with remarkable skill.A North Sea ferry is "like a toppled office block". And let's get into the habit of pulling over (finding somewhere legal and convenient) before we start those "urgent" phone calls.The writer is a spokesman for the Institute of Advanced Motoristsmotoring independent.co.uk. It is a style perfectly suited to the lyric poem, but is here deployed in a series of essays about travels, cityscapes, watching wild creatures, and domestic life at her home in Scotland.In essence these are prose poems, carried neither by argument, nor by story, nor by any driving emotion In some, it would be fair to say, not a lot happens.