Skip to content

Scottish Poetry Library

Register/Sign in
Shopping Bag Shopping Bag
Bringing people and poems together
  • Home
  • Poetry
    • Poems
    • Poets
    • Our National Poet
    • Best Scottish Poems
    • Poetry and Mindfulness
    • Podcasts
    • Posters
    • Publishers
  • Library
    • Become a borrower
    • Catalogue
    • Collections
    • Ask a librarian
    • Copyright enquiries
  • Learning
    • National Poetry Day 2019
    • National Poetry Day archive
    • SQA set texts
    • Learning resources
    • New to poetry?
    • Advice for poets
  • Events
    • Calendar
    • Exhibitions
    • Venue hire
    • List an event
    • Fringe application
  • Shop
    • Books for Christmas
    • Pocket Poets
    • New Titles
    • SPL Favourites
    • Scottish Poetry
    • Help
  • About us
    • Our story
    • Our people
    • Our projects
    • Support us
    • Jobs
    • FAQs
  • Visit
    • Find us
    • Our building
  • Blog
Shopping BagShopping Bag
Ask a librarian
  • Home
  • >
  • Poetry
  • >
  • Jen Hadfield
  • >
  • Hedgehog, Hamnavoe
Donate Donate icon Ask a Librarian Ask a Librarian icon

Hedgehog, Hamnavoe

Jen Hadfield

Flinching in my hands
this soiled and studded but good heart,
which stippling my cupped palms, breathes –

a kidney flinching on a hot griddle,
or very small Hell’s Angel, peeled from the verge
of a sweet, slurred morning.

Drunk, I coddle it like a crystal ball,
hellbent the realistic mysteries
should amount to more than guesswork

and fleas.


Jen Hadfield

from Nigh-No-Place (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2007)

Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

Tags:

21st century poems Best Scottish Poems 2008 hedgehogs scottish poems wildlife

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2008. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editors in 2008 were Rosemary Goring and Alan Taylor.

Editors’ comment: 
The way some have tried to see the world in a grain of sand, Jen Hadfield turns her gaze on this most prickly of customers in search of insight into the universe. Her feel for the natural world is heart-felt and acute, but she resists sentimentality. The hedgehog immortalised in this poem is nothing more, or less, than itself. This poem works not only for its deceptive simplicity and the feelingness of its language – “peeled from the verge of a sweet, slurred morning” – but because the tipsy Hadfield recognises that this animal, like all creatures, remains resistant to being mythologised. It is more interesting and meaningful just as it is.

Author’s note: 
‘Hedgehog, Hamnavoe’ was written as I crept back home from my friends’ house, in the half-light, in midsummer. It was one of those walking poems that used to come very easily to me. My friends offered me their spare bedroom but I am one of those that likes to sleep in their own bed. Drunk, especially.

It’s a walk of maybe forty minutes to my own house, along a bandy bit road that climbs out of the community of Hamnavoe, hugs the coast over a crescent beach of white sand and up and down over the Rummelies; a high patch of exposed moor, looking out to Foula. I was insistent on getting my little pilgrimage home, and rarefied with wine, encountered the hedgehog on the way.

I’m intrigued that it’s necessary to interrupt a hedgehog and pick it up to get the gist of it, and a bit ashamed. They’re still a bit miraculous to me, as are hermit crabs and the carnivorous sundew and all the spectacular small creatures domestic to our country that I was introduced to in Ladybird Books as a child, but met with rarely.

I live in Shetland mostly because here I encounter nature outwith the cabinet. And because I knew, that as I had found with Skye and British Columbia, it would break my heart to visit. For all the accessibility of the cliff tops and beaches and moors and lochans, and the ease of living here, the wild-life and plant-life and sea-life that manage to thrive, and the fact that there are places you can just about be alone under the sky define Shetland as wilderness, as far as I’m concerned. To be elsewhere, at least at this point in my life, seems wrong.

I decided a while ago not to try and suppress my hope-dream-desires about home place, and to move somewhere remote, rural, and probably Boreal. The alternatives were less selfish (it’s not easy to visit friends and family) and more straightforward. Having moved to Shetland and settled somewhat and realised one of those dreams, I encountered intense enjoyment of the place Shetland proved to be, interrupted with emptiness and what-next-ness. The realistic mysteries of Hedgehog, Hamnavoe, I think, sum up for me the what-next-ness of satisfying a dream and wondering where next to invest your hope.

Share this
Facebook
Twitter
Email

Learn more

Best Scottish Poems 2008

edited by Rosemary Goring & Alan Taylor
Find out more

Jen Hadfieldb.1978

Jen Hadfield has family in Canada and England, and her adopted home is Shetland; her writing is often drawn to the contradictions of travel and home, the music of voices, and the importance of land and place.
More about Jen Hadfield

Podcasts

Our audio programme of poets, poems and news for you to listen to.
Listen Now
  • Newsletter signup
  • Accessibility
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Scottish Poetry Library
5 Crichton's Close, Canongate
Edinburgh EH8 8DT
Tel: +44 (0)131 557 2876
© Scottish Poetry Library 2019.
The Scottish Poetry Library is a registered charity (No. SCO23311).
City of Edinburgh logo Green Arts Initiative logo Creative Scotland logo
By leaves we live