 Front Cover | |
| Author | Jen Hadfield |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Published | 2008 |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books |
| ISBN | 978 1 78037 028 6 |
Nigh-No-Place is the second collection of poems written by Jen Hadfield. It was published in 2008 by Bloodaxe Books and won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry.
The book is named after its inaugural poem, "Nigh-No-Place". The poem itself is prefaced with an excerpt from Shakespeare's "Tempest", act 2, scene 2: "I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; and i with my long nails will dig thee pignuts..."
The poem uses non-traditional titles and place names to draw the reader into its literary world.
The collection features a variety of styles and formats, including uses blank verse, free verse, prose, and several metrical patterns. Onomatopoeia is used throughout, as well as alliteration and fine sensory detail. She also sprinkles her text with Scottish words and phrases such as "trow" and "stumba" ("dense mist or fog" [1] ).
She divides the book into three sections of related poems. The first section, "The Mandolin of May", deals with the wilderness of Canada and man's fear of and dependence upon it. The second portion, "Nigh-No-Place", describes the culture, folklore, traditions, and landscapes of Shetland Islands, Scotland. The final section, "Seven Burra Poems", is inspired specifically by Burra, the collective name of two islands (East Burra and West Burra) it the Shetland archipelago.
The settings of this book are the wilderness of northwestern Canada (in the Mandolin of May), the Shetland Islands, Scotland (Nigh-No-Place) and Burra, Shetland (Seven Burra Poems). It features several narrative poems that alternate between the first- and third person perspective as well as free-form verses and in a stream of consciousness style. She occasionally devotes entire pages to the clarification of a word or theme, sometimes a single word or sound is the theme. She often makes her point using animals' calls, cries, and grunts in repeating structures, with literary critic Stephen Knight noting her "use [of] white space, at one point evoking a silence into which a bird calls." [2] Animals are the main focus of much of the material and she spends a great deal of time detailing them extensively and examining their behavior without resorting to simple anthropomorphization. One example of this is the poem "Paternoster", which is a recitation of The Lord's Prayer, but from the perspective of a draft horse. This could be an illustration of bathos or blasphemy, depending on the inclination of the reader. Nevertheless, she attempts to record the connection between man and nature without justifying or condemning it. [3] Some poems are somber, reflective pieces and others are light hearted celebrations of the flora and fauna of her environment.
Nigh-No-Place won the TS Eliot Prize for poetry in 2008 when Hadfield was 30, making her the youngest female winner of the prize and the youngest overall until Ocean Vuong won in 2017 at the age of 29. [4] [5] Andrew Motion, then the British poet laureate and chair of the judges panel (Motion, Lavinia Greenlaw, and Tobias Hill), said "Nigh-No-Place shows that she [Hadfield] is a remarkably original poet near the beginning of what is obviously going to be a distinguished career". [4]
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His trials in language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). The poem relates the varying thoughts of its title character in a stream of consciousness. Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem chapbook entitled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its publication, "Prufrock" was considered outlandish, but the poem is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic shift in poetry from late 19th-century Romanticism and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.
Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Jorie Graham is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. She won the 2013 International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. On 1 October 2019, she took up the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Sinéad Morrissey is a Northern Irish poet. In January 2014 she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax and in 2017 she won the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection On Balance.
Sheenagh Pugh is a British poet, novelist and translator who writes in English. Her book, Stonelight (1999) won the Wales Book of the Year award.
Christine De Luca is a Scottish poet and writer from Shetland, who writes in both English and Shetland dialect. Her poetry has been translated into many languages. She was appointed Edinburgh's Makar, or poet laureate from 2014 to 2017. De Luca is a global advocate for the Shetland dialect and literature of the Northern Isles of Scotland.
Jen Hadfield is a British poet and visual artist. She has published four poetry collections. Her first collection, Almanacs, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003. Hadfield is the youngest female poet to be awarded the TS Eliot Prize, with her second collection, Nigh-No-Place, in 2008. Her fourth collection, The Stone Age, was selected as the Poetry Book Society choice for spring 2021 and won the Highland Book Prize, 2021.
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist. Vuong is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant the same year.
Fiona Benson is an English poet. Her collections have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2015 and 2019. Vertigo and Ghost (2019) won Forward Prizes for best collection.
Hannah Sullivan is a British academic and poet. She is the author of The Work of Revision, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the University English Book Prize, as well as the poetry collection Three Poems, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is associate professor of English literature at New College, Oxford
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Loop of Jade is the first book of poetry by Chinese-British poet Sarah Howe, and the first debut collection to ever win the T. S. Eliot Prize, in 2015. The collection contains poems that trace the author's journey into her own roots, including poems about growing up in Hong Kong and about her mother.
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