London Grip Poetry Review – Jen Hadfield
Poetry review â THE STONE AGE: Edmund Prestwich discusses an original and sometimes experimental new collection from Jen Hadfield
The Stone Age Jen Hadfield Picador ISBN 978-1-5290-3734-0 80pp ÂŁ10.99
The physical construction of The Stone Age has an impact on the reader thatâs both important and hard to analyse. It starts with a relatively simple example of a concrete poem. Called âStone Circleâ, this is a circle of eight ovals like the noughts on a Microsoft keyboard, with two placed close together, suggesting an entrance. Thereafter, scattered between groups of poems set out in a conventional way under their titles, there are unheaded poems printed in greyscale letters of hugely varying sizes. These poems have practically no punctuation except that given by dramatically varied spacing. Their effect is dependent on their presentation, so I donât think thereâs any value in quoting from them here, but theyâre both haunting in themselves and have a strong impact on the way we read the more âregularâ poems. These seem to emerge with the sudden clarity of things seen through rifts in mist or moments of waking, and then to recede behind the mistiness or hypnagogic uncertainty of the next greyscale poem. Some of the greyscale poems are evocative of elusive sense impressions; others directly or indirectly evoke elusive or liminal modes of consciousness or communication. Theyâre untitled on their own pages but given titles of a sort on the Contents page â âof a sortâ because these titles are only offered in brackets.
The blurb on the cover describes the poems as an âastonished beholdingâ of Shetland and that puts a finger on something essential about how they work. Cast as descriptions, anecdotes or addresses, they donât seem to consider rocks, sea creatures, sea or weather so much as to feel their impact. The poet meets them as sentient, conscious beings in a world her poetry makes seem alive in all its parts. An example would be the beginning of âPictish Stoneâ, where description of an ancient carved stone stele is entwined with address to an unconscious human, apparently very old and perhaps dying:
I lay my hands on this basking thing (since you donât wake when nurses turn you) â in the yearâs first warmth, do I feel it stir? We watch and wonder how earth-fast you are, surfacing from more than sleep â
The words themselves are mostly simple, common monosyllables but theyâre beautifully paced and placed to draw us into a hushed, almost hypnotic interplay of suggestions and associations in which the inhuman stone and the unconscious person become as it were metaphors for each other and both are made to seem alive in similar ways. The odd construction of that first sentence contributes to the effect of a trancelike blurring of stone and person â the speakerâs mind seems to move onto a new line of thought before finishing the old one.
Thereâs a more elaborate, strenuous and possibly strained interchange between human and non-human poles in âNudibranchâ. Here, Hadfield projects herself into a nudibranch â one of those weird, brilliantly-coloured âsea slugsâ with exposed gills â having it speak as if it were a woman in a clothes shop:
I ease my naked body down into the rockpoolâs closet, clinging to the vertical rocks with my soles, hanging a moment before I let myself fall
So far, so good. Metaphor always depends on both the likeness and the unlikeness of the things compared. Usually the emphasis falls on likeness, on what makes the two ideas flow together. Here, what both fills the image with an animating strangeness and makes it feel not quite right or comfortable seems to be the way our visualising splits between images of woman and nudibranch. Thereâs a point to the hint of discomfort here. Apart from suggesting the difficulty of the imaginary identification, the contrast between the slight sense of strain in the beginning and the ease of the ending gives the end its feeling of rapturous arrival. However, to my mind the splitting produces a patch of bad, clotted writing in the middle of the poem:
Dropping to the velveted floor the seizing onesie of brillo hair, the sweat-sheath that horripilates with urchinous buttons â
After this lapse, the simplicity of the last lines beautifully suggests the relief of achieved ease, , of having completely become the nudibranch as it cherishes these elementary sensations of being at home in its pool:
Condensing down to antlers and weed and warm and warm and weed â
The book is full of such vivid, arrestingly empathetic encounters with non-human things. Iâve never been to Shetland, but a friend who has says theyâre highly evocative of its particular atmosphere.
The other side of these encounters is the impression weâre given of the speaker herself. Here itâs necessary to be tentative because weâre dealing with floating impressions created in different poems, joining them like an old-time astronomer looking at Mars and seeing a network of canals. Itâs their very indefiniteness that makes them evocative, and what I say about them may make them seem more substantial than I mean to. Iâm not sure whether the term âneurodiversityâ that Iâve seen on material about Hadfield is or isnât useful or true â Iâve always thought the feelings Iâm about to talk about were fairly common among shy, introverted people, though presented here with unusual sensitivity and sharpness of focus. Iâm sure many people coming out of the social restrictions of the covid period will be experiencing them.
The first feeling is one of separation. In contrast with the speakerâs passionate communing with nature, in âGaelicâ she presents herself as finding difficulty understanding and communicating with other people, becoming âexhausted of / conjugating feeling, parsing silence between speaker / and listener, and remembering to ask / questions, direct but not too / directâ. She feels her interlocutor suddenly looking at her as if she herself were talking incomprehensibly in Gaelic. The delightful prose poem âUmbrellaâ touches on the same theme â thrillingly evocative of the sheer wateriness of rain, blurring into an almost visionary apprehension of people as âwells of standing waterâ, it closes on an image of her own alienation from the women chatting round her, seeing them as if they were gilled creatures standing in the rain while she sat cut off from it under an umbrella. A more intimate version of similar feelings appears in the extraordinary â(Your tongue)â, one of the experimental poems whose title only appears in brackets on the contents page. Much of the poemâs power in the book comes from spacing, from the effect of the pale grey-scale printing and from the way lines in dramatically enlarged fonts loom up between others half their size. However, the bare words will show how the poem gets depth from its hinterland of untold story, from its obliquity and the way simple lyrical intensity bursts out of confused indecision. As printed in The Stone Age I find it both tantalizing and moving:
(Your tongue was fastforwarded mine is a doglick a treacly dopplering you know I like (I liked) you very much (like you love hummingbirds) how I love(d) your consciousness its strobing blur)
More often, though, inferences about the poetâs sense of herself are suggested by the way she describes the things she sees, and depend on an assumption that what she sees in them also expresses an emotion or desire of her own. Suggestions that might be faint in themselves are reinforced by echoes between poems, as I suggested earlier, and become cumulatively compelling. So, for example, a poem called âRockpoolâ seems to connect with âLimpetâ. In the first, after an exhilarating description of the seedling barnacles streaming down like falling stars, she closes
This is no place to show up without a shell all that protects us from the press of heaven â
Then âLimpetâ takes the form of an address to a limpet, vividly evoking its motion (in a full rock pool) and its return to its very own spot on the rock when the tide goes out and it must clamp down to preserve moisture. It ends with a brilliant metaphor
Clamp down â turn the key of yourself in the lock of yourself, fasten â with a hundred infinitesimal mortices â
The use of the second person â frequent in self-admonition â and the human, technological metaphor of lock and key add to the impression that this poem is about the speaker as well as the limpet sheâs theoretically addressing.
What Iâve called the âgreyscaleâ poems are âexperimentalâ in a radical and obvious sense. Iâd like to think my quotations from others have suggested the originality and creativity of Hadfieldâs expressive use of metre and line break in all her poems. Creativity of this kind is one of the many pleasures offered by a book that richly rewards careful and repeated reading and gave me considerable pleasure. I hope itâs not churlish to end with a minor reservation. I liked her repeated ending of poems with a dash, as in my last two quotations, suggesting openness and inconclusiveness. However, I couldnât understand a trick of starting lines with a full stop or comma that appeared in several poems.
Edmund Prestwich» Blog Archive » Jen Hadfield, The Stone Age â review
May 30, 2021 @ 3:11 pm
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