The best recent poetry – review roundup Rishi Dastidar
In
The Stone Age (Picador) Shetland-based Jen Hadfield provides a vivid portrait of the landscape of her home, while also showing how neurodiversity can lead to new slants, insights and metaphors when viewing the world. Songs of “Deep Time” jostle with reminders of our transience: “But humankind / are brief, soft // fireworks, prone / to go off at a moment’s / notice”. The landscape is filled with an unexpectedly playful inventiveness, typographical as well as verbal; stones speak, ravens fly upside down as they become ideas, razor clams are buried giants’ fingernails, emotions become bigger in the big country. What’s most captivating is how Hadfield brings sensations to life; subtle and propulsive, her language fizzes and dashes “in little surges like rills of clear pleasure”. The poems more often than not end with a dash, rather than full stops – warm, open invitations to revel in the