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| Best
Scottish Poems 2004 Introduction |
The Poems | Acknowledgements
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The poems |
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| Jen Hadfield |
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Fratres (Taking You With Me)I paint the low hill until I admit . . The layby's up for it, grips . Up here it turns out it's less simple First published in Chapman, 102/3, 2003. It’s hard to write about a poem that’s two years old. I’m happy that 'Fratres' still sounds pretty spoken, to me. I’m happy that reading it takes me acutely back to the times and places of its writing: Glasgow, Kirkwall (Orkney), Swinister (Shetland). As I left Glasgow for Shetland I was pretty worried about people and poetry, the fact that half my conversations were completed in my head. It occurred to me that to live without letting anyone know what I think might not be an enviable achievement. I spent my days in Shetland grouching about working in the morning and getting my fresh air in the afternoon. I might not speak for three days. The Fratres poem is to do with having a head-full of words interrupted by brief encounters. Perhaps not-speaking for three days, when I did meet people, on the feeder bus down to Lerwick or getting my post from Jean and Tommy, their words would stick in my head for hours. And what’s a poem? Speech that sticks? If I say ‘a ewe’s fleece is stained by the season of her last tup’, I’m not talking about ownership but the intensity of encounters when you live so solitary. Like staring at something and getting a retinal burn. When you live so solitary you’re liable to obsess over the last time you were touched, not the person, the having had hands on you. The Fratres (Arvo Pärt) tape was one of my soundtracks for Shetland, product of another brief encounter in Glasgow; a recommendation from a customer who came in to buy Brie de Meaux and only Brie de Meaux every Saturday. There was a bit about him in the poem originally. One week he didn’t come in; the next week he was back, grey and thin. I said what happened? He said I know it sounds insane but I was in hospital with the hiccups. Fratres is a series of instrumental variations on a couple gorgeous themes. It was a directional gift: I’d been trying to write like that, to make a spectacle of something by harping on about it fifteen different ways, to peer at it through a spectrum of filters. If I were more single minded I would write nice tight undistracted poems or perhaps a different poet would be able to work a single poem that could take the pushme pullyou of three different places and one..two..three – I reckon about thirteen metaphors. Instead this loose form emerged, a stack of micropoems on the same theme. Maybe call it an ‘array’. I’m going to work the poem a bit now, cut back hard the bit about the layby on the hill road – now there’s a Pushme Pullyou – split it up and give the images more space. I’d rather the whole poem was longer, more varied, played more with the possibities of repetition and slight alteration. Jen Hadfield I don’t know what to say about this, every reading is different – sometimes it seems clear, sometimes more mysterious – and that’s why I like it. It’s hard work but why should it always be easy? Hamish Whyte Jen Hadfield's work appears in journals online and worldwide: in the UK (including The Dark Horse, Avocado and Magma 28 where she was the featured author), Canada (Grain, The Fiddlehead) and Europe (Poetry Salzburg Review, Muuna Takeena). Her collection Almanacs will be published by Bloodaxe in 2005. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2003 which she is currently using to live and travel in Canada, writing and giving readings from the East to West to North coasts of the continent. She’s also learning salsa, poker from her Grandmother, and how to co-habit with the resident black bear. Her most current artist book project is an anthology of poems written at her grandfather’s old fishing lodge, and chunkily bound in fragments of it: cedar and flyscreen. › Chapman |
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