Jen Hadfield interview

On the RSA Arts & Ecology website, William Shaw talks to this year's T.S. Eliot Prize For Poetry winner, Jen Hadfield.

It's a silly thing to say to any poet, but language is obviously very important in your work.

I have a bit of anxiety about my own ability to read because I find it quite hard to sit still. At the moment I'm trying to learn to read while walking. But the flipside to that is that my appreciation of poetry is more the spoken end of things - not necessarily poetry in performance, but the stuff in books which is honest and attentive to what spoken language is. Certainly that's what lights me up. The spoken word is haphazard. It veers from the formal to the irreverent and the sophisticated to the downright childish, and I like doing that.

William Shaw has also blogged about the interview.

...it’s inevitable that anyone with Hadfield’s subject matter becomes political, in the sense that - as Siân Ede was saying - nature is no longer just out there as the ineffable, unstoppable force. “It is tainted. It is sad. It is ending.” It’s something broken, and if you write about it now you are inevitably writing about catastrophe. Hadfield sees herself as writing from within the ecopoetic tradition, but with that modern knowledge