Strangely Wonderful and Often Incongruous: Jane Commane on the faultless delights of Jen Hadfield and Stephanie Norgate

Jen Hadfield, Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe, 2008) £7.95
Stephanie Norgate, Hidden River (Bloodaxe, 2008) £8.95

Nigh-No-Place is a slow-burner, a quirky and insistent collection that needs a little time to get under your skin, but it’s worth the wait. Jen Hadfield’s poems are lyrical, (particularly the poems in the first section, ‘The Mandolin of May’) joyously footloose and full of strangely wonderful and often incongruous things. In fact, incongruity is the right word for explaining exactly what makes this collection tick.

Hadfield supplies unusual juxtapositions of metaphor and imagery throughout, which are jarring but not disruptive, weaving a lullaby of idiosyncratic and affectionate language that is as much surprising for its accuracy as it is for its uniqueness. Take these lines from ‘Hedgehog, Hamnavoe’:

a kidney flinching on a hot griddle,
or a very small Hell’s Angel, peeled from the verge
of a sweet, slurred morning

and the fields that “wore cows like fuzzy Hombergs. / Behind, a herd of astounded hills” that close the poem ‘Kodachrome’.

At first these surprising turns of phrase, mixed with humour, colloquial snippets and wry observation may feel a little disorientating, but that’s all part of this collection’s slow-burning qualities. It requires time for this characteristic style to fall into place, but once it does you realise that Hadfield’s biggest achievement here is the inventive use of language to reinterpret landscapes without reliance on a more traditional naturalistic vocabulary.

These wild, vast, and at times inhospitable places are also marked by human presence, if not persistence, and this is reflected in these juxtapositions of language, the interruption and continuation of the natural world, as in ‘Burra Moonwalk’: “the historical quadbikes / the daffodil snow”. This is poetry that is able to evoke the sense of the places it goes, both the wide horizons of Canada and Shetland and the lives of those who live there, through the simplest of details and a revelling in playful language.

Nigh-No-Place is a memorable second collection from Jen Hadfield, made up of still, northern landscapes glanced through a slow exposure, a musical force of language and locality that perfectly suits her chosen geographies, and is well worth the time to discover.

Stephanie Norgate’s debut collection is difficult to fault. Hidden River consistently delivers what you expect it to, a solid collection that tackles weighty issues of life and death with great warmth, keen focus and precise language. It’s an occasionally frustrating collection in some ways; immensely well-written, but not always enough of the unexpected waits around the corner to confound you, even though you keep suspecting it is just about to.

That aside, there are moments of affecting and softly spoken tenderness – the child’s first sounding of words in ‘Echo’: “to see her voice clothe itself in bones and skin, skin”. There’s the haunting regrets within the lilting rhythm in ‘The Wheedling Man’, where the descriptions are powerful enough to leave you feeling in the presence of both the man,

so aware of his lost life,
fingering the old bus-pass in his pocket,
the photograph of his wife

and “a man with matted hair and Rasputin eyes”. There’s the enduring impression of trapped birds in a blocked-up chimney in ‘Jackdaws’, “a slow flap of feathers scattering ash, / brightening again into their own blackness”, reminiscent of the writer’s itch to write, and the times when those sounds in the walls are ignored or unable to free themselves.

‘The Trip to Monterey’ and ‘Bulb Primer’, (where “greening beaks / become green tongues”), demonstrate Norgate at her best. In the former, a life before a sudden death is re-imagined and encapsulated by the workings of memory, the accident becoming

(...) the egg,
rolling from your mother’s table, the blood-spot quivering on the imagined floor.

Hidden River is a well-realised first collection; Stephanie Norgate knows her path and sticks to it with a great tacit confidence. That the poems are so neatly rounded is perhaps to their own detriment at times. But this is an honest collection that stakes its place with quiet determination, and it’s up to you to figure out if it will take you in or leave you out.