Nigh-No-Place
by Jen Hadfield
Summary
Nigh-No-Place was written between two enormous silences, the Canadian interior and the Shetland Islands, and it made Jen Hadfield, at thirty, the youngest woman ever to win the T.S. Eliot Prize. The title is her own coinage for the almost nowhere she works from, and the book is a field study of what language does at the edge of the habitable: poems from her Canadian travels, where the place names themselves become incantation, and poems from Burra in Shetland, where she settled, built from the islands' weather, its sheep and wrens and voes, and the Shaetlan dialect words she sets into English verse like finds from a beachcombing. Hadfield is a visual artist as well as a poet, and the poems have a maker's trust in objects; she is also one of contemporary poetry's true ecstatics, her signature being the litany, the list poem that piles up the world's particulars until inventory turns into praise. Home and belonging are the book's open questions rather than its comforts, worked at by a young writer testing whether a self assembled from weather, work, and vocabulary can hold at the latitude she has chosen. The daring is in the smallness: no capital cities, no headlines, a bet that the far periphery, exactly rendered, is central to anyone alive in a body. The 2008 T.S. Eliot Prize agreed, choosing her second collection over the grandees on that year's shortlist, and the award marked a generational door opening, toward the ecological, the local, and the strange, that British poetry then walked through.
Historical Context & Significance
Hadfield had won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003, published one previous collection, and already travelled in Canada, all before Nigh-No-Place appeared from Bloodaxe in 2008; the Eliot judges' choice of a thirty year old islander over that year's famous names surprised many readers and proved influential, licensing the place rooted, dialect friendly nature poetry that flourished in the following decade. She stayed on Burra in Shetland, working as poet, artist, and tutor, and her later collection The Stone Age extended the project of listening to the far north. Shetland, which had a rich dialect literature but little national visibility, gained a laureate the whole archipelago claims, and the prize's judges gained a reputation for courage they have traded on since.