Review
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, ALMANACS is the most refreshing debut for ages. --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
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, ALMANACS is the most refreshing debut for ages. --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
Product Description
Almanacs: a mythic scrapbook, bag of cats, a one-man band...Jen Hadfield's Almanacs is concerned with lists, rules and archetypes and what they don't account for. It takes as its subjects the Tarot, the lore of Full Moons, weather myths and travellers' tales. The book's central sequence, Lorelei's Lore, is a road movie in poems, set in the north of Scotland: Ultima Thule, hijacked by elusive sirens and Harrier jets. There's the ruthless Lorelei, gorgeous Ghosty who's given up on everything except the Road, and Skerryman, patron saint of bad weather and absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder. It's obsessed with yearning, like the two seas separated by the tip of Shetland 'metres apart/and desperate for each other.' Lorelei's Lore wonders 'what's beautiful?' (tarmac? sheep carcasses? sunburn?) and 'where's your native home?'
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.
