Poem of the Month - March 2009

Daed-traa I go to the rockpool at the slack of the tide to mind me what my poetry’s for. It has its ventricles, just like us – pumping brine, like bull’s blood, a syrupy flow. It has its theatre – hushed and plush. It has its Little Shop of Horrors. It has its crossed and dotted monsters. It has its cross-eyed beetling Lear. It has its billowing Monroe. I go to the rock-pool at the slack of the tide to mind me what my poetry’s for. For monks, it has barnacles to sweep the broth as it flows, with fans, grooming every cubic millimetre. It has its ebb, the easy heft of wrack from rock, like plastered, feverish locks of hair. It has its flodd. It has its welling god with puddled, podgy face and jaw. It has its holy hiccup. Its minute’s silence     daed-traa. I go to the rockpool at the slack of the tide to mind me what my poetry’s for. by Jen Hadfield From Nigh-no-Place (Bloodaxe, 2008) Poem supplied courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library

A few words about the poem In my case the compulsion to write is the same compulsion that made me lift stones in the garden as a child or try and trap lizards, mudfish, furry bluebottles...  When poems work best they are urgent, instantaneous, and in my case, often identified by their nerdiness. The Daedtraa poem was the final cumulation of repeated visits to the same tiny turbulent rockpool behind my house in Burra, here, in May, in all the tides; trying to get one clear macro shot of the softmint candystriped claws of a hermit crab emerging from its shell. The beauty of a poem is that the lizard, mudfish, hermit needn't and mustn't perish as a result of the poet/child/nerd/specialist's passionate curiosity ... the poem is the aquarium that doesn't sour. The macro setting and the macro poem are of huge interest to me; microcosms that reward you for making yourself thoroughly at home in whatever territory surrounds you.

About the poet Jen Hadfield was born in Cheshire in 1978 and studied English Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where she took two modules in Creative Writing tutored by Robert Alan Jamieson. She went on to earn an MLitt with distinction from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, tutored by Tom Leonard, whose guidance has been crucial to her poetry to date. Jen has dual citizenship with Canada. When she was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2003, for her first manuscript, Almanacs, published by Bloodaxe in 2005, she used it to explore Canada. She returned to Shetland to live in 2006, where she has been working as a gallery assistant, teaching, mentoring and writing. In 2008 she was presented with the TS Eliot Prize for poetry. The Chair of the Judges, Andrew Motion, described Nigh-No-Place as “a revelation: jaunty, energetic, iconoclastic, even devil-may-care.”