Roddy Lumsden Recommends Jen Hadfield

One of my favourite Scottish books of recent years is Jen Hadfield's first poetry collection Almanacs. I write here about books which come from Scottish publishers, or Scottish writers or which are on a Scottish theme. Jen is from Cheshire and out mutual poetry publisher Bloodaxe is located some way over the border in Northumbria. But Almanacs fits neatly into the third category.

Jen moved to Scotland to study in the mid 90s and has stayed for most of the years since, first in Glasgow and then further (and further) north. Almanacs is set in a range of Northern and island landscapes, much of it comprising of a long sequence of poems about a 'girl racer' and her half-real, half-imagined travels in a mythopoetic Scotland. I first encountered Jen Hadfield when she won an Eric Gregory Award a few years ago and am proud to have been one of the writers who helped her shape that first collection which, though it didn't get the attention it richly deserved, has become a word-of-mouth poetry world success.

As a poet friend of mine says of Hadfield's work, she seems to put words together in a way they have never been before. She's a nature poet, but not of the sort that term brings to mind; she's an experimentalist, but not wilfully or frustratingly so; she's a storyteller, but is not hung up on or constrained by narrative. It's no surprise then to find her new, second book of poems Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe £7.95) is quickly getting noticed – a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a full-page review in The Guardian, and I hope an appearance on one or two prize shortlists will follow.

About half of this new book is set in the Shetland Isles, where she now lives, and it ends with a sequence of poems about the twin-island of Burra. Many of the poems are informed by (but not in) Shetland dialect - titles include 'Snuskit', 'Gish' and 'Daed-traa' and this poem 'Glid' (the word means 'sunshine between showers'), which exhibits one of her techniques, which the book's blurb shorthands as 'repetition, hiatus and breath':

The first half of this new collection is set in Canada, where the author spent a few months on the back of her Gregory award, visiting relatives and taking word-photographs of astonishing landscapes. It is packed with surprising images (she paints a horse 'from the creased Jupiter of his arse / to the spotted dominoes of his teeth') and twenty-twenty description. If you haven't encountered Hadfield's work before, you ought to now – either book will do fine.