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foggy_rosamund's review against another edition
5.0
An intelligent, emotional book full of muscular and surprising language, this gives me all I look for from nature poetry. Hadfield's adopted home is Shetland, and these poems are full of the language of the Shetlands, evoking the sounds of the islands and the voices of those who live there. Hadfield shows us how the words we use create who we are and how we understand the world around us. Her poetry is sinuous, full of strong, surprising images of cliffs, wind, pigs, furrows, sea, mushrooms, bivalves, all of which she looks at with a direct, unsparing gaze, but also wit and humour. Startling images such as in her poem, "Hairst" (autumn), capture our attention:
Ringing unanswered on the cliff,
like an old black bakelite
phone, the raven
She sometimes includes more than one poem about a particular thing, such as mackerel or puffballs, showing that even the smallest parts of nature have multiple facets and ways of being. Puffballs are "a broken string / of irregular peals / packed with cool, // white roe" in a concrete poem that scatters the puffballs' spoors across the page, and, in another poem, they are herded by "the moon" "through the mold / like little white bulls". In Hadfield's poems, nature is not always a place of beauty or solace: the things she writes about are very much themselves -- pigs, in "Gloriana", view humans as strange servants, who are given the opportunity to tend to them, as the pigs say, "you shall rest against the royal bellypork, and scratch the bearded royal jaw, which recalls the Tudor" or the cat in, "The Black Hole", who "biffs" a robin's carcass, "crunching into the ginger-nut / of its breast". The poems are always in dialogue with the human and animal populations of the Shetlands, and those who have drawn inspiration from the islands before Hadfield. This is a rich, musical collection, full of life and the constant changes of the sea. Highly recommended.
Ringing unanswered on the cliff,
like an old black bakelite
phone, the raven
She sometimes includes more than one poem about a particular thing, such as mackerel or puffballs, showing that even the smallest parts of nature have multiple facets and ways of being. Puffballs are "a broken string / of irregular peals / packed with cool, // white roe" in a concrete poem that scatters the puffballs' spoors across the page, and, in another poem, they are herded by "the moon" "through the mold / like little white bulls". In Hadfield's poems, nature is not always a place of beauty or solace: the things she writes about are very much themselves -- pigs, in "Gloriana", view humans as strange servants, who are given the opportunity to tend to them, as the pigs say, "you shall rest against the royal bellypork, and scratch the bearded royal jaw, which recalls the Tudor" or the cat in, "The Black Hole", who "biffs" a robin's carcass, "crunching into the ginger-nut / of its breast". The poems are always in dialogue with the human and animal populations of the Shetlands, and those who have drawn inspiration from the islands before Hadfield. This is a rich, musical collection, full of life and the constant changes of the sea. Highly recommended.
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