‘Melodeon on the Road Home’ is one of the best of the early poems.

I love your slut dog, / as silent with his three print spots / as a musical primer. / He sags like a melodeon / across my spread knees.

Musical references continue through the poem. When the narrator flicks on the headlamps, it’s as if I pulled an organ stop…

‘Staple Island Swing’ is another of the stronger works in this section.

What I love - the tall clock of thermals, blackbacks / turning on Sunday axles. A guillemot gaping, / mouth like a mussel shell. The grooved bright meat. // What I hate - cormorants - / when there’s one chick too many, sprawled / on the rock like an over-loved fuzzy bear.

The central sequence, ‘Lorelei’s Lore,’ is a road movie in poetic form. It follows characters like Skerryman and Ghosty, but above all the Scottish landscape. This inner collection is a mixed bag in more ways than one. ‘The King’s Courtyard’ is one of the better works, with nice phrases like she slaloms mini-roundabouts. ‘Fool Moon’ is probably my favourite of all the poems in the book:

On Ronas stands the Skerryman / and winds uncarded clouds / onto barbed wire bobbins.

‘Crying Taing’ is also worth reading, and there’s a very short work ‘Ullinish’ which has a haiku-like quality. However for me there are a few problems in the collection which may affect some readers more than others. Very often, there seems to be a sense of detachment, a lack of intimacy. Another problem lies in the fragmented nature of many of the poems, both individually, and in the ‘Lorelei’ group. The language that is Hadfield’s strength is also to some extent her downfall. Poems become inscrutable through use of unfamiliar words and turns of phrases. She piles the language on, obscuring the poem’s interior. And with characters like Skerryman, Ghosty, the narrator who may be the poet herself, there’s far too much going on. Perhaps these poems are indeed meant to be a “mythic scrapbook” but this fragmentation plays against individual poems and the collection as a whole. Take the title, ‘Lorelei’s Lore’ - this refers to a German myth. But the landscape described is Scottish. Then there’s a poem referencing Colette’s ‘Gigi’ which seems somewhat out of place in the road sequence, though it works as an individual poem. Tarot imagery also turns up in this section. Some poems are bitsy – ‘Fool Moon Voices’ and ‘Markings’ being two examples. On the other hand, ‘Fool Moon,’ as mentioned above, is beautiful. But it possibly suffers from being buried inside a sequence with somewhat scattered images, archetypes, and characters. ‘Fool Moon’ is however an example of what Hadfield can do when her work is more concentrated on a single idea.

There are readers who will undoubtedly love these poems because Hadfield is a gifted poet. She obviously delights in language and the natural world. Some of the problems I’ve had with this collection may simply come down to a matter of personal taste. But there is a sense in which there is too much going on and that all the different elements - the piling on of language and imagery, the use of different archetypes, both in type and culture, the different characters, the patchy, scrap book nature of the poetry and imagery - are pulling the collection in too many directions, denying it a powerful heart, and individual poems too suffer the same fate. And yet this book is still well worth a read, for the fabulous turns of phrase that give a new perspective to the landscape.

I have the sneaking suspicion that by the end of this year, the book will have grown on me enough to end up as one of the better collections, and one of the most interesting debuts. Hadfield is a writer to watch out for, and this book in its scrap book form is probably exactly as she intended it.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.