Product 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 with a ravenous appetite for new landscapes. She took epic routes: the railway line 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 - her fluency and tongue-tiedness; repetition, hiatus and breath. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16619 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Review
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, judge's comment on the T.S. Eliot Prize

A zestful poet of the road, a beat poet of the upper latitudes, Jen Hadfield conjures poems and prose-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

About the Author
Jen Hadfield lives on Shetland where she works as a poet, writing tutor, artist and sometimes shop assistant. Her first collection ALMANACS (Bloodaxe Books, 2005) won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, which enabled her to begin writing NIGH-NO-PLACE in Canada. She recently received a Dewar Award to produce a solo exhibition of Shetland ex-votos in the style of sacred Mexican folk art, incorporating rubrics of very short fiction. She plays the mandolin and banjo-mandolin badly. She won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her second collection, NIGH-NO-PLACE (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2008.

Customer Reviews

It minds you what poetry is for!
Jen Hadfield is the youngest poet ever to win the T S Eliot Prize. She is mightily gifted and has a voice that melts the legs and caused a mild palpation in this gentleman's chest! Hear her read on the magnificent Poetry Archive-(Very well done indeed Andrew Motion). 'Nigh-No-Place,' her second collection reeks of the harbour-smells of Scottish islands-those God-droppings set in sapphire seas. Shetland in particular forms her muse and thank the Gods for poets who actually love the land, who love her fiercely and passionately. The landscapes of city-dwelling poems are mute by comparison. There is a lilting thread that gently weaves a skein through all these poems. Language used like brushes of gentle light to articulate the moods of weather, the blashy-wadder, the inner moods. Here sheep and cats and dogs are characters as much as people. There is a refreshing sincerity in Jen's poems. When I went back to my own work I was struck by my poetry's gravitas, its metropolitan disdain or pehaps the frown it wears as it looks around for victims (I mean subjects!)... Ahem. Jen's poems have none of that-they are indeed fresh, open and full of youth's yearning outwards to the world. My favourite was "Odysseus and the Sou'wester". My favourite line-"The heron like a sickle reaps an Iron-Age sun." I wish her well in what promises to be a very fruitful career.
Buy the book and read it slowly rolling the words inside your skull as you would a good wine in your mouth. There's iodine from the seaweed gathering in your nostrils as you read this verse. Sit with it and carry the poems around for a few days. There's a waft of Lagavulin here. These poems take you back to what really matters-they mind you what poetry's for.

Refreshing and inspirational
This is a fantastic collection. It deserves the 2009 TS Eliot Prize. Several of Jen's poems have inspired me to write my own awesome poems.