The Stone Age

by Jen Hadfield

Winner of the 2021 Highland Book PrizeJen Hadfield’s new collection is an astonished beholding of the wild landscape of her Shetland home, a tale of hard-won speech, and the balm of the silence it rides upon. The Stone Age builds steadily to a powerful and visionary in Hadfield’s telling, everything – gate and wall, flower and rain, shore and sea, the standing stones whose presences charge the land – has a living consciousness, one which can be engaged with as a personal encounter.The Stone Age is a timely reminder that our neurodiversity is a we do not all see the world the world in the same way, and Hadfield’s lyric line and unashamedly high-stakes wordplay provide nothing less than a portal into a different kind of being. The Stone Age is the work of a singular artist at the height of her powers – one which dramatically extends and enriches the range of our shared experience.

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 18, 2021

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A unique, vivid journey into thought and landscape, this book repays reading and re-reading. I read it in one rapid burst shortly after I received it in late March, and have since been dipping in and out of it, and want to return to it again and again. Hadfield's use of language is fresh and completely absorbing: she has a unique way of capturing the essence of her subjects, whether they are limpets, stone circles, shadows or language itself. In this collection, she also pushes her use of the page in new directions: sections of this book appear in much larger, greyscale font, and take up the expanse of the page. These poems are generally short and yet expansive, full of immediacy and playful language: "fog pouring over / the whalebacked hill / fog and flowers a thousand years / the rustle of the fog the / soft roar of the pouring fog." As in her previous collections, The Stone Age explores Hadfield's adopted homeland of Shetland, capturing unexpected aspects of the natural world. In other reviews, much is made of the ways in which Hadfield inhabits other consciousnesses, such as a cliff or a mountain, but that wasn't the aspect of this collection that particularly struck me. Hadfield does gave space and texture to inanimate aspects of the landscape, but to me this gave a sense of how our own minds overlap with the world around us, and the sense of ourselves isn't always defined by the edges of our physical body. The collection also explores difference between minds, and how our internal landscape of thought is unique, and can be hard or impossible to communicate to others. Hadfield's poem Gaelic is a particularly moving example of this, capturing the difficulty of communication and the ways using spoken language can feel impossible, particularly of you are neuroatypical. "Neurodiversity" is described as one of the subjects of this collection and the various shapes of poems bring this across: that different ways of being allow us to experience new aspects of the world. Through Hadfield's exploration of consciousness, the reader of her collection comes to inhabit new ways of being. A complex, urgent and tender collection: highly recommended and deserves to win many awards.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Unfurling a washed-up scroll of birch-bark —
thick hangnail from a Canadian tree —
to re-read the history of the day we found

it — having rolled and unrolled this creaking
codex — gingerly squeezing to test its dry ache —
to nuzzle and snuffle its dusty sweetness —

I'll have to chuck back this betulant boat: after all this time,
all it does is bark back to the forest —

all it can think about is the forest —'

(p50, 'Neverspel')

[Goodreeds User · Rating 4 out of 5]

it rocks

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jen Hadfield's new collection of poetry is steeped in the landscape and light of Shetland, where she lives. In it, the land and the things in the land are given a voice: standing stones, flowers, rain, sea, cliffs, and rocks. And they have a real beauty to them, even if they are not always easy to unwrap. If you unwrap a poem.

The collections also uses the page and the graphical topography. Certain poems are larger, solid letters in stone grey reflecting the "...lava slow/ and sometimes mangled/conglomorate/gray lag of language..."* of the standing stones themselves. Sometimes the text fades gently away.

The thing I most like about this collection is the joy in words. The way that, read aloud, the words are as smooth as chocolate or as crunchy as Cornflakes. There are a scattering of Shetland words, of Scots and of - I think - Norse. This is a word bath where you can soak yourself to wash off the concerns of the day.

Very fine work.




*I can't do justice to the layout of this poem in a quote. Sorry.

[Seb · Rating 3 out of 5]

nature poetry isn’t really my thing but love the idea of presenting how we all see the world differently through form, language and layout

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To you I’m suddenly speaking Gaelic, / like language translated / into slow light — / and swift dark —“ Jen Hadfield’s The Stone Age is a stunning new collection of poetry exploring the landscape and mythic atmosphere of her home up in the Shetland Islands. Language, its trappings and failings, its stiltedness, leads the way through through the more physical, outdoor and natural or natural-inflected world that defines these poems. Hadfield has such a gift for musical cadences, an urging rhythm all stream-like, “Running like water / until you run clear —“, leading to the collection’s heart: the heart, the conscious feeling, of a natural world that longs to engage with us. Hadfield’s series of parentheses poems, particularly ‘(You said what you said)’, are startling — visually, in how they’re typeset, and lyrically, in how they flow and unfold, how they confront the reader with a near-total strangeness and singular reality: “Because my sentence is / lava slow and /sometimes mangled / conglomerate / grey lag of language / a wingbeat behind”. In such poems as ‘Shadow’ and ‘Strimmer’ we are gifted with darkness, with the visceral — here and elsewhere we are taught to appreciate what it means to see and think in our world in a way that does not conform, that steps in its own way. Hadfield’s poetry is “an interrupted cadence — / a whistle under the breath —”, and as such it will make tangible a sense of peace and community with all that’s around.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. The poems read like stone carvings, beautiful in their exactitude, as though they had been long hidden until the scrub and dirt had been brushed off, and they emerged like runes.

Ms Hadfield lives in and, I would say, of Shetland. The titles—“Rockpool,” “Dolmen,” “Pictish Stone,” “Cliff”—of some of these works indicate the tenor of the book. Some Shetland vocabulary helps to fix the reader’s vision to meet the poet’s.

The Shetland Islands lie between GB and Norway, a subarctic archipelago which is the farthest northern reach of GB. The weathering of the stone is reflected in Hadfield’s rather strange monumental insertions running through the collection, carrying memories, sounds of fishermen, and a cloudy erosion of text, perhaps intended as mood-setting, again, placing the reader close to the poet’s perspective.

A fine book, well worth the membership in the PBS. I do recommend that, if you read this far, you look into it.

[J.J. Eden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished this absolutely exquisite collection of poetry by Jen Hadfield. Her use of language is both clever and beautiful, every word feels treasured, creating a collection that I wanted to sink into and savour. I’ve always loved poetry that draws on nature and uses the landscape to communicate the vastness of the human experience - The Stone Age is a stunning example of just that. The wildness of the Shetlands brought to life. The language of nature used to unfold a powerful commentary on neurodiversity and the beauty and power of seeing the world in different ways. Beyond the fabulous words, I love the way that formatting has been used throughout to enhance the messages of the poetry - the appearance of the words on the page drawing the eye to read deeper. This is one I’ll be returning to again and again.

[CMarie Fuhrman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fell in love with Jen Hadfield by listening to one of her poems that was recorded for Stanza, a Scottish poetry festival. It was lovely the way that she used questions and silence and since it focused on a wild place, I was immediately drawn. The poems in this, her first full collection that I have read, are no less brilliant. I cannot stress the importance of reading poetry from other countries and, when doing so, making certain not to "judge" that poetry based on cultural expectations. I imagine that I have both grown in poetic wisdom and in language from reading Jen's book and I cannot wait to read the rest of her work to learn more from her.

[Gerard Woodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable poems rooted in Shetland landscape and culture, full of tactility and objects and brilliant observation – and some interesting typographical tricks, pages of big greyed out text, a prose poem that slowly fades out, as if disappearing into mist, or the dusk (which is what it describes). The poems tend to be tall and thin, and have an eroded quality – and everything seems integrated – person, language (lots of interesting local dialect), place. I loved the poem about a strimmer, and there were many other unexpected delights.

[Xenia Tran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poems about life and the wild landscape of her Shetland home. Jen has a fresh, original voice and a deep way of seeing and engaging with the natural environment around her. It was a delight to read and I will dip in and out of this collection to read the poems again in years to come.

[Sarah Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new addition to Scottish nature poetry. You may need a dictionary in places but the sense of place and space is quite evocative.

[Erica Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read many of these out loud twice. That's a fairly good sign that it's a good collection.

[Moira McPartlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems, inspired by nature really appealed to me. Some of the form is innovative. After I finished I felt I should read this again.

[Abbey]

I didn’t really get a lot of it. Made me feel quite shallow

[✰matthew✰ · Rating 4 out of 5]

the imagery and description of landscape, natural elements and place are stunning and evocative in this collection. i enjoyed the playful nature of layout, particularly the opening piece.

[Rakie Keig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely collection of poems

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5