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  • The Plinky-Boat
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The Plinky-Boat

Jen Hadfield

Something near to true
night-darkness. The children
are playing the Plinky-Boat –
a xylophone made
from a reclaimed yoal –
built for flexibility in a coarse
sea, you can tell it fledged
with ease, just blushed
from boat to instrument,
transpiring streams
of these hoarse night-
notes. For its copper pipes
are cut to breadth exactly
so the boat’s beam is
its sotto voce and two rills
of rising pitch run
into stern and stem to
the harmonic of each
hinnyspot – the point
the boards of gunwales
and stem flow together.
I don’t know what it is
about this place that things
metaflower so readily
into their present selves.
The instrument’s a boat,
the notes unresonant
and discs of thin light
swarm over the pipes
from the boys’ headtorches.
Perhaps we heard seals
broaching in the harbour
as they answered the girls’
handclapping game –
I doubt they moaned
in their haunted wise –
here was everything –
words lost, as I’m trying
to say, their echo, that
yodel into past and future.
The poem wouldn’t exist,
but we couldn’t stay.


Jen Hadfield

from Sonnets Exchange: 2016-2017 (London: British Council, 2017).

Reproduced with the permission of the author.

Tags:

21st century poems Best Scottish Poems 2017 childhood English games hobbies metamorphosis musical instruments scottish poems ships and boats

About this poem

This poem was included in the Best of the Best Scottish Poems, published in 2019. To mark the fifteenth anniversary of our annual online anthology Best Scottish Poems, the Library invited broadcaster, journalist and author James Naughtie to edit a ‘Best of the Best’ drawn from each of the annual editions of Best Scottish Poems.

Editor’s comment:

An old boat is turned into a musical instrument. A lovely idea, made for Jen Hadfield to explore. Her rhythmic touch is sure and she can direct the reader to every word that counts with what looks like enviable ease, although of course it’s not really like that. ‘The Plinky-Boat’ is assured verse, about feeling, and about poetry itself, ‘words lost, as I’m trying / to say, their echo, that / yodel into past and future.’

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Best of the Best Scottish Poems

edited by James Naughtie
Find out more

Best Scottish Poems 2017

edited by Roddy Woomble
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
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