Book description
Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.
The language of Jen Hadfield's poetry is one of incantation and
secular praise. Her first book, Almanacs, was a traveller's litany,
featuring a road movie in poems set in the north of Scotland.
Nigh-No-Place is the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the
natural world.
Hadfield began her new book on the hoof, travelling across
Canada, hungry for new landscapes. She took epic routes: the railway
from Halifax to Vancouver and the Dempster Highway's 740 km of gravel
road, ending in the Arctic oiltowns of Inuvik and Tuktoyuktuk. But it
is in Shetland that she becomes acutely aware of her own voice.
Nigh-No-Place reflects the breadth of ground she's covered.
'Ten-minute Break Haiku' is her response to working in a fish factory.
'Paternoster' is the Lord's Prayer uttered by a draught-horse.
'Prenatal Polar Bear' takes place in Churchill, Manitoba, surrounded
by tundra.
'Nigh-No-Place is a revelation: jaunty, energetic, iconoclastic
- even devil-may-care…she is a remarkably original poet near the
beginning of what is obviously going to be a distinguished career' -
Andrew Motion.
'A zestful poet of the road… Jen Hadfield conjures poems of
great spirit and imaginative daring from the northern landscapes.
Lively, youthful and full of the joy of language' - Kathleen Jamie.
'Onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhyme and a smattering of Shetland
dialect supply Hadfield's world with a rackety music - claws on
tarmac, a rock-chip hitting a windscreen, a waterproof crackling “like
a roasting rack of lamb” - which she orchestrates with a variety of
forms including prose poems, incantations, spells and a prayer… When
much contemporary poetry has about it a whiff of the coterie,
Hadfield's refreshing voice carries all the way from the top of
Scotland to blow some of the dust off British verse' - Stephen Knight, Independent.
