Oh my. What a treat this book is!
I have only very occasionally ventured into writing poetry myself, usually as interpretive commissions for clients. I am more of the why-use-one-word-where-297-will-do persuasion. I do admire good poets and poetry, though, and have a sneaking adoration for the really epic stuff; the adventurous Aeneid, the transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gore of The Lays of Ancient Rome, the glorious Highland fakery of Ossian.
I have long enjoyed Jennifer Morag Henderson’s historical and biographical work – Daughters of the North is real edge-of-the-seat stuff – but Jofrid Gunn is a step miles out of her admirable comfort zone. I find this extraordinary book defies any normal description. It is, but is not just, a collection of poems. It is a biography of sorts. There is a direction of travel of sorts – Faroes to Highlands, Highlands to Faroes, both time and place shifting with the tides and centuries. Yes, the story of Jofrid is related through this journeying, to a degree – if not as literally as I had anticipated, but this was no disappointment. Instead, the reader experiences a kind of multi-sensory immersion in carefully patterned words. When I had finished the book and its copious notes, I felt salt-blasted, wind-blown, refreshed, and deeply sorry that the experience was over.
Jennifer has been learning Faroese to give her work increased authenticity. Has that mammoth effort paid off? Without question, yes.
This style of prose poetry is less about rhythm than the shapes and patterns of words and phrases within the text. Again, the closest comparison I can draw is with epic Celtic poetry – the Taìn bò Cùlaìgne, the Mabinogion and the brilliant imitation of these in Macpherson’s Ossian.
The patterns within Jennifer’s poetry rouse and enchant and beguile in equal measure, and soon I found myself enjoying them far too much to bother myself unduly about any analysis of their (huge variety of) themes and threads and structures. Whether Jennifer is writing as or about Jofrid or as or about herself, I was not always certain, and for me, this is a boundary pleasingly blurred.
Hard to pick out favourites. The poignant story of the violin which was played to sound like the wind, one of several prose interludes, I found deeply moving and reread several times.
The Salt and the Coal reminded me of how long the remarkable Jean Gordon had to wait for the right time and place in which to marry her true love in Daughters of the North.
I have had a similar (if less poetic) conversation than Wedding-ring Shawl – advice from a mother-in-law, all about a knitted shawl in wool fine enough to draw through a wedding ring – patterns again: an old family friend, Eva Holmes, used a special frame surrounded by tiny pin-tacks to shape and launder them, and gave me a fine shawl for my firstborn. I had not thought about that for a long time. Good, powerful poetry like this is provocative in its original sense; it calls forth voices from deep within a reader’s heart and head.
Do read this remarkable book, which is so much more than just a debut poetry collection.
Jennifer Morag Henderson – Jofrid Gunn https://share.google/bScBpItj2dA23q7up
Vee Walker writes... 