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 first collection, Almanacs (2005), and her second collection, Nigh No Place (2008) are both published by Bloodaxe.

She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2003, and a Donald Dewar Award in 2007.

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. Her artist book and poetry can be seen on her Rogue Seeds website.

She was one of the Scottish Poetry Library’s New Voices for Autumn 2005, and is the Poet Partner at the SPL's collection in the Shetland Library.

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Related links

› Jen Hadfield's Rogue Seeds website

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Books I love

An old favourite
'Gerry Cambridge is an old favourite, not that he'll thank me for "old"! - fine photographer, harmonica AND poet, and naturalist ... he taught me how to recognise an owl feather. I first met him and he had a rucksack clanking-full of about eleven harmonicas, fool's silver or something ... he's a compass point, what I'm aiming for. In poetry, to some extent, too. His lyricism.

'Still love Edwin Morgan, his breadth. His example keeps my mind on the job! And stops me from limiting myself, poetically; it's easy for that to happen.'

A new favourite
'I'm dabbling newly in... A B Jackson, and really really keen on a Canadian called Adam Dickinson, his "Cartography and Walking"'

A current interest
'Jean Ritchie, the Appalachian folksinger who has been driving
me dotty in Canada. Mainly a cappella, some dulcimer... she's made me hanker after walking the Appalachian Way:

"hangman, hangman slack up your rope
oh slack it for a while
oh look there yonder I see ma comin'
she's walked for a many long mile" .'

Jen Hadfield, September 2005

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Featured poem

Orchid Dog

Orchid Dog swells at dusk,
claiming the clapboard moor,
its chambered cairns and basalt topknots

He raises a field-full of white gulls,
shadow bruising a bloated sheep.
He jerks and swings a mouthful of rank ribbons.

Orchid Dog is soaked and shoulder-deep.
The burn hanks his hair, bares
his belly-suede and coded nipples.

He hunts a flooded vole
he’ll never kill and polkas on it
jumping on and off its hot ember.

I scuff wet grasses for a rock anvil.
He rolls the wet plush
in the rose and chocolate corals of his grin.

Jen Hadfield © 2005
from Almanacs (Bloodaxe 2005)