Skip to content

Scottish Poetry Library

Register/Sign in
Shopping Bag Shopping Bag
Bringing people and poems together
  • Home
  • Poetry
    • Poets
    • Poems
    • Makar – National Poet
      • Our Waking Breath: A Poem-letter from Scotland to Ukraine
      • A Woman’s A Woman
      • The story of the Makar – National Poet of Scotland
    • Best Scottish Poems
    • Spiorad an Àite
      Spirit of Place
    • The Trysting Thorns
    • Poetry Ambassadors
      Tosgairean na Bàrdachd
      • Poetry Commissions: Walter Scott 250
        Coimiseanan Bàrdachd: Walter Scott 250
      • Poetry Ambassadors 2021
    • Posters
    • Podcasts
  • Library
    • Become a borrower
    • Catalogue
    • Collections
    • Ask a librarian
    • Copyright enquiries
  • Learning
    • SQA set texts
    • Learning resources
    • Designing sensory poetry activities
    • Children’s poems in Scots
    • National Poetry Day archive
    • New to poetry?
    • Advice for poets
  • Events
    • What’s On
    • Meeting rooms and venue hire
    • Exhibitions
  • Shop
    • Poetry Highlights
    • Entropie Books
    • Stichill Marigold Press
    • Poems for Doctors, Nurses & Teachers
    • Scottish Poetry
    • Poetry Pamphlet Cards
    • Help
  • About us
    • Our story
    • Our people
    • Company Papers & Policies
    • Our projects
    • Our building
    • FAQs
    • Find us
  • Support us
    • Become a Friend
    • Donate
  • Blog
Shopping BagShopping Bag
Ask a librarian
  • Home
  • >
  • Poetry
  • >
  • Jen Hadfield
  • >
  • Taboo
Donate Donate icon Ask a Librarian Ask a Librarian icon

Taboo

Jen Hadfield

You want to look on the lea-side
in winter, the swamp thickening
like the uterine wall,
popping its puffballs
and creaming its butterwort,
folding in the sundew and squill,
putting out the eyebrights.

You ask what they do
for accommodation –
try high pools
in the red hills
of winter,
hind-paws slapping up flares
of red rain –
look for their niche
of collapsing peat.

Pilgrims of such
an ascetic order
don’t even own
the spectral colours
of snow.

No, that’s the white flag
at Amen Corner.

That’s your heart going
nineteen-
to-the-dozen.

That’s just the cold water
stilling itself
in the form
of your throat.


Jen Hadfield

published in Edinburgh Review, 133  (2011)

Reproduced by permission of the author.

Tags:

Best Scottish Poems 2011 hares riddles wildlife

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2011. 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 editor in 2011 was Roddy Lumsden.

Editor's comment:

After some time away from poetry, working on other things, Jen Hadfield has returned, her poems as ever, surprising and fresh, her words, as a friend said to me, appearing to be in an order no one had considered until now (and none but her might consider). This short poem is about hares (the form at the end is the giveaway) in winter. With the hare comes caution, and this intriguing and elusive poem ricochets against both its addressee and its reader with its hint of menace.

Author's note:

‘Taboo’ is a sort of a riddle. It’s a simple premise, basically: it’s a riddle about an animal; you have to guess what the animal is. That’s the only reason it’s called ‘Taboo’. Now I think about it, I’m not sure it’s a very good title: all it does is describe the form. Anyway I’m quite into riddles at the moment. There’s something I want to explore in the parallels between the historical game of the riddle with its once-high stakes (a domestic game apparently still current in Shetland as ‘guddicks’ – more Viking influence?) and the heightened anxiety that poetry often excites in our culture: the folks’ fear of ‘not getting it’. I think I want to explore them because I hardly ever ‘get’ riddles and I still worry about ‘getting’ poems.

A poet friend and I hashed over this one recently. I had a problem with an instability in the voice, and she had a problem with the obscurity of the imagery. She lives in London; I hadn’t really worked out that the farther from the wild-scape you stay, the harder the poem might be. I sort of agreed with her. I really don’t like the thought of my poems being ‘difficult’. (I think they are often ‘difficult’ when they’re not working.) I really do want to communicate. But when I tried to make things a bit more transparent, my editing deranged the rhythm and the life went out of it. So I’m working towards a new version of this now. I’m trying out some hirpling two-line stanzas with plenty of breath between them. I’m taking out the extended description of the bog. I’m hoping that there’s a difference in dissolving the meaning from a concretion of words and in apprehending something from their rhythm and chime, and I’m hoping that, when I’m done, the poem will flush up a live animal with strong hind-paws, to hurtle up through the body of the reader...

Share this
Facebook
Twitter
Email

Learn more

Best Scottish Poems 2011

edited by Roddy Lumsden
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

Newsletter

Sign up for our regular email newsletter.
Subscribe 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 2022.
The Scottish Poetry Library is a registered charity (No. SCO23311).
City of Edinburgh logo Green Arts Initiative logo Creative Scotland logo
Scottish Poetry Library