Edinburgh University, 6-8 March 2010

Jen Hadfield

YOU KNOW how posters and periodicals accumulate. Yes you do. Think of the protective tubes, the padded envelopes that spill from the cupboards and storage units in the houses you have lived in. All the attics. I’ve never been able to throw out a glossy broadsheet called Briggistanes.

The concept, back in the 20th century, was that works in language and image would be shared between the outlying islands of Scotland. Robert Alan Jamieson from Shetland was a main mover. I still send selected visitors away with a copy or two. So literature trickles to its audience.

The Scottish Islands feature spot at an international islands literature festival in Ouessant, back in 2007, gathered a gang representing a fair sweep of sea-splashed turf. Then RAJ organised an event in Leith which kept the dialogue going. Events organised by HI~Arts Writing Development co-ordinator Peter Urpeth brought performances by many island writers, including RAJ to the Belladrum Festival last year.

That’s the potted history. Only a week ago there was a well-attended gathering in Edinburgh University, under the title Between Leith and Lerwick. This was a day-long series of varied lectures on Shetland cultural themes, but with a look out to check how one archipelago fits in a world scheme.

Now I don’t pretend to know a seminar from a symposium or a paper from a thesis. But I’d say there were some stunning performances in the course of the day. The programme came to a spirited conclusion with a fine evening made up from the varied voices of contemporary poetry from Shetland and Fair isle.

And for those who could swing another day in the city, there was a chance to hear Jen Hadfield read her poems, now dappled with the linguistic trickery of her Shetland home.

I’m going to try to describe a few selected highlights. I don’t think I can find a word to say what it all was – a gathering maybe. There’s probably a Shetlandic word which describes a mix of the erudite, the vernacular and the sheer good hearted spirit of it all.

Take Donna Heddle’s social history of the migrant workers known as “herring-girls”. The pace of the presentation was at a sprint but a clear and crisp group-portrait emerged. Accuracy is a finer thing than sepia.

Carla Sassi could not explain why an associate professor of literature at the University of Verona has a compulsion to concentrate her efforts on Scottish literature – and writing which expresses the spoken culture of groups within Scotland, at that. But her passion lit an examination of what we mean by islands. Her presentation was mapping – but more by words than line-drawing. It was a forensic probing of our definitions of islands.

My own mind was buzzing back to reading More’s Utopia, in English, (not the original Latin) when in sixth year at school – after being invited by a humane, socialist teacher to compare it with Aldous Huxley’s Island.

Carla Sassi’s combination of information and provocation could easily have led to a whole day of discussion. I’m thinking now of the Island as a character in Tove Jansson’s crisp fiction. And Orcadian stories of the island which appears out of fog but is not recognized and can never be found again.

Alex Thompson dared to ask quite bluntly how much the Shetland environment had really affected MacDiarmid’s mission during and after the years he lived there. That was another subject which could have easily led to a day of dialogue. Maybe there is a way future events could include space for group discussion of the points so skillfully raised by the speakers.

But there was only one thing missing from a well-nigh perfect evening of Shetland poetry and music. That was the voice of Mr Jamieson. He managed the presentation of the Shetland team with wit and skill and something that sounded like the symptoms of laryngitis.

His own voice, is for me, normally the strongest of all. But this loss left space for a wide range of voices. The common thread was confidence in a particular voice of Scotland. I’d say that both Orkney and Shetland are more assertive of their identity than the Hebrides.

Never more so than when Paul Ritch, from Unst and once a fisherman, conjured up remembered waves and brought the spirit of his mentor in storytelling into the room. Christine de Luca’s voice is very strong and clear so that quite a strong rhythm and vocabulary of Shetland is conveyed.

The clarity might well explain the success of her poetry in translation. It’s in her fine poetry as well as her speaking voice. I’m thinking of the image of lines of timber piles which are the last indicators of a huge herring industry in places such as Baltasound.

Her presentation is a highly skilled performance but this runs the risk of an element of distortion in the natural rhythms. It took me a long time to realise that Iain Crichton Smith was one of the finest readers of poetry. He would tell daft jokes or make erudite comments in between but his natural speaking voice came across more directly than any I’ve heard. A different voice but in this way, I think Jamieson’s performance of poetry (when you hear it) is similar.

Lise Sinclair provided the Fair Isle variant of a voice which does sound much closer to Sumburgh than North Ronaldsay. She sang unaccompanied to open the show and I could have heard a bit more of that as I could have heard a bit more of her poetry’s own music. But there was also an intriguing chiming of harmonium and accordian in the music which alternated with the poems.

Laureen Johnson’s voice is new to me. Two short simple poems ended the session in an appropriate and resonant way but they also set up the issues to be explored in Jen Hadfield’s solo reading last Monday.

This is a poet who has made Shetland her home but only after a wanderlust that took her to Manitoba. As noted in the collection Nigh-No-Place which contains most of the Shetland poems she shared. The aesthetic of the poetry is constant, place to place. You sense a real joy in language as a medium for its own sake with a playful willingness to disrupt the rhythms she has found. Within the rhythm or the off-rhythm you get a detail that is so accurate it sings for itself: “A wormcast of ice slumps from the augur”.

Unlike Laureen Johnson and all of Saturday’s readers, she is not a speaker of Shetland dialect. But she has picked up words and phrases and maybe rhythms as well. Many of the turns of phrase though are not unique to Shetland – gimmers are gimmers on Lewis too. And folk give each other a spell on jobs all over Scotland.

From what I heard rather than read, I’d say there’s a comparison with the way Gary Snyder uses the language of logging camps in his poetry. The chainsaw rhythms carry the sweet stink of resin through them. Now take Hadfield’s simple poem about casting a spinner for sea-trout. “The spinner flutters/but falters not” would not be bad at all but the word is “fluchters”.

I think this is part of the search for accuracy. It also sows a little harvest. The reaping comes at the end – a move from contemplation to companionship: “we’ll put away a few/tonight, bairns, twathree,/three or four.”

It’s as much about usage as it’s about dialect, and it’s really all about homing in to exactly the right sound as well as the right contribution to the imagery.

But I’ve got to say I was struggling to hear the subtleties at the reading. I see the point of not speaking up loud enough to distort a natural speaking voice. But when that voice is quiet anyway and favours falling cadences, then surely there is an argument for a wee microphone. It’s then a bit like live radio but you’re seeing the speaker.

So I bought the book at the eclectic Ceilidh Place bookshop before the ferry home. With it, I bought Tom Leonard’s outside the narrative (Etruscan books/Word Power Books). It’s been a joy to read again the details first transferred by Jen Hadfield’s beguiling voice.

There were a few surprises. In a fine poem brimful of exotic fish, painted like MacGillivray as taught by Audobon, I read “my symbiotic groupie” when I thought I’d heard “grouper’.

Hadfield’s answers to questions were poems in themselves. For me there is another reminder of Iain Crichton Smith – something he wrote in a review. He was pointing out how one poet celebrated something in the natural world by simply describing it accurately enough.

But the mention of Tom Leonard invites contrast. I heard him read first in the late seventies and have never forgotten the voice. I hear it now when I lift his fine book. The voice has sinew all through it. Maybe the outlook is more social and less of a personal vision than Hadfield’s. But the sound is important in many of the poems, whether it has words you can decipher as Glaswegian or not. Both books convince me that we should continue to meet and hear poems performed out loud.

© Ian Stephen, 2010

Links

• Between Leith and Lerwick
• Jen Hadfield
• Ian Stephen