Poetry Doubles Review Jen Hadfield and Vivien Jones

This week’s Poetry Doubles welcomed prize-winning poet Jen Hadfield and the increasingly well-known Vivien Jones.

Vivien, who lives in Powfoot, has just become a winner in the Sedburgh Short Stories competition, and is a performer in Making Waves with Jackie Galley. She also has the distinction of having performed in Dumfries & Galloway’s very first Poetry Doubles series four years ago. Her humorous, almost misleadingly gentle performance was obviously appreciated by the audience, who were then provoked to laughter by unexpected mischievousness –
“gorse is a feast, a binge/ a prick of a shrub”.

She read from the performance Making Waves, and also as yet unpublished work from a trip to Italy, where she visited the house of Isabella d’Este, the first buyer of viols in the renaissance period –

“I touched the walls as if the purr/ of Isabella’s viols might be there”.

Jen Hadfield, described by Tom Leonard as “a whole and committed poet”, proved to be an engaging performer. Juggling sheaves of paper, chuckling with the audience, she read from her forthcoming book, “Nigh No Place”, work based around 15 months spent in Canada, and then her return to home in Shetland. She confided her struggles with writer’s block in Canada, explored in the poem “Still Life With The Very Devil”. She also elicited some audience participation in her poem “Paternoster”, about flying to Canada, knowing that in the hold stood six well-drugged thoroughbred racehorses. “Paternoster” is written as a kind of prayer, ending wisely “May the horse never wake that stands in mid-air”, duly repeated by a very entertained audience as a liturgical response.

Back in Shetland again, Jen’s poems described a land which hides itself behind fogs, plays hard to get – a persona encapsulated in the skerryman who figures in the poems collected in “Almanacs”. Her poems explore weather and the landscape –

“Haar climbs the Voe/ and fills the valley’s pitcher./ Fence posts barble it./ The red and umber mosses/ drink it in.”