Reviews

The Stone Age by Jen Hadfield

foggy_rosamund's review

5.0

A unique, vivid journey into thought and landscape, this book repays reading and re-reading. I read it in one rapid burst shortly after I received it in late March, and have since been dipping in and out of it, and want to return to it again and again. Hadfield's use of language is fresh and completely absorbing: she has a unique way of capturing the essence of her subjects, whether they are limpets, stone circles, shadows or language itself. In this collection, she also pushes her use of the page in new directions: sections of this book appear in much larger, greyscale font, and take up the expanse of the page. These poems are generally short and yet expansive, full of immediacy and playful language: "fog pouring over / the whalebacked hill / fog and flowers a thousand years / the rustle of the fog the / soft roar of the pouring fog." As in her previous collections, The Stone Age explores Hadfield's adopted homeland of Shetland, capturing unexpected aspects of the natural world. In other reviews, much is made of the ways in which Hadfield inhabits other consciousnesses, such as a cliff or a mountain, but that wasn't the aspect of this collection that particularly struck me. Hadfield does gave space and texture to inanimate aspects of the landscape, but to me this gave a sense of how our own minds overlap with the world around us, and the sense of ourselves isn't always defined by the edges of our physical body. The collection also explores difference between minds, and how our internal landscape of thought is unique, and can be hard or impossible to communicate to others. Hadfield's poem Gaelic is a particularly moving example of this, capturing the difficulty of communication and the ways using spoken language can feel impossible, particularly of you are neuroatypical. "Neurodiversity" is described as one of the subjects of this collection and the various shapes of poems bring this across: that different ways of being allow us to experience new aspects of the world. Through Hadfield's exploration of consciousness, the reader of her collection comes to inhabit new ways of being. A complex, urgent and tender collection: highly recommended and deserves to win many awards.

mt_gilley's review

emotional funny hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

Beautiful collection, with a keen sense of place, landscape, nature, material; our place as one physical, earthly component of the environment; and the environment's place in a human psyche, or at least its imprint on it. Wistful at times, funny and wry, and then blissfully, achingly melancholy.