Far, far away from the shenanigans in east London, 40 miles out in the north Atlantic, lies the island of Rona, "inhabited once, but now the island is returned to birds and seals; grey seals breed in thousands there, many seemingly disinclined to leave. Every day, all around the shore, were rocks softened by the shapes of seals, watching us from the waters."

In Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie takes us, for the most part, to the northern fringes of human habitation, and then beyond. She looks at gannets in Shetland, whale skeletons in Bergen, petrels in Rona, the northern lights in Greenland. On Hirta she discovers that 70mph winds can knock her down. "The sensation is not of being tumbled like a leaf, but of being thumped by an invisible pillow. It doesn't hurt if you've got lots of clothes on; one just finds oneself on one's knees, as if beholding a miracle."

Well, as I've always said, if you want someone to deliver good prose, get hold of a poet. Or, perhaps, a harassed mother. Or, come to think of it, a Scottish woman writer. Jamie is all of these, and internal evidence suggests that she rather relishes the chance to go somewhere scant of human habitation.

On her first trip to St Kilda, which proves, because of the wind, abortive  they only get as far as the Monach Islands  she returns and writes this: "I'd been on the desert islands, my husband had been at home with the infants. He was the one who looked ravaged, like Robinson Crusoe." (There's a certain kind of first-rate writing, like Jamie's, which while not actually being funny, often suggests that there's a good laugh around the corner; but that gag precipitated a huge bark of recognition from me.)

So: 14 essays, of varying lengths, drawn to the north but not always there, characterised by great, but never overpowering, thoughtfulness. The idea is to look at nature; or the human interface with it. Sometimes the results are disturbing. Musing, after her mother's death, on what it means to "let nature take its course", and then mildly irritated at an environmental conference, she goes to see Professor Frank Carey, clinical consultant in pathology at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. "I told Frank about the environmentalists' and writers' conference, and how the foreshortened definition of 'nature' was troubling me. I'd come home grumpy, thinking, 'It's not all primroses and otters.'" And so what she does is take a guided tour of our own bodies: most significantly, what can destroy them, from within. This can often mean cancer cells, and so Jamie gets to look at, and feel, a 10in stretch of cancerous colon.

Reader, when a reviewer confesses to not having completed a book it is usually an act of bravado (and probably not even true anyway): "This book stinks so badly that not only can I not discharge my professional duties, I am going to boast about it." Not in this instance. For here I have to say that Jamie's writing is so good that reading this particular piece in its entirety has proved impossible so far. The odd sentence penetrates: "Lymph nodes feel like lentils or grains of rice; they resist being squashed." But when a style is so good that it feels as though it can conjure up what it describes, then, if you are sensitive to it, reading about cancer makes you feel as though you will get it as a result. (I do know an oncologist but decided not to ask him if this was indeed the case.)

So I skipped on a few pages and went underground, to the subterranean cool of a Spanish cave, where the walls are covered with neolithic animal paintings older than those of Lascaux. Describing the weirdly formed stalagmites, she adds: "We have entered a body, and are moving through its ducts and channels and states of processes. The very chamber we stand in is streaked with iron-red; it's like the inside of a cranium, a mind-space, as though the cave were thinking us."

At which point I put the book down again and thought: "I wonder if I would actually kill to be able to write, or think, like that." It's like this pretty much all the way through.