POEM OF THE WEEK

Jen Hadfield recently had a bit of a shock. The poet answered an unexpected call from America, and found out she was being given $175,000 – one of Yale’s coveted Windham-Campbell Prizes for literature, awarded this week. Recipients aren’t warned ahead of the call. “That’s insane,” she said, welling up at the news. “Do people cry a lot?”

Hadfield’s writing is deeply invested in place. She has lived and taught in Shetland for 18 years, capturing its landscapes brilliantly in her breakthrough collection Nigh-No-Place (2008), and in her forthcoming memoir Storm Pegs, out this summer.

But this brand-new poem for The Telegraph finds her between places, caught between home and family, or past and future. It’s about departures, and how they can take more than one kind of toll on us. The enjambment and unusual punctuation capture the rhythms of speech; here, the commas at the start of a stanza might be rests in a musical score, or turning points along the road.

“Even I think this is a bit of a strange poem, but I like it for all that,” she tells me. “It grew out of driving up and down the M6 what felt like continuously, in the couple of years before Covid. I was building my house in Shetland and in the meantime living an itinerant life, migrating between residencies, and the homes of friends and family. I was always on the road, I was always leaving, and I noticed how I can still never leave my parents’ house, and their tenderness, without a pang.” Tristram Fane Saunders

TOLL

How, as I carried out the last suitcase – I met Dad with an oily hanky and he said I wiped your car’s eyes

and how, leaving the house separately to drive two hours in convoy, he still waved me off at the door

, and I remember how

(carving the ice from my windscreen in harsh, loud arcs, exhaust a solid floss in the air, hanging and drifting as if all we can see of spirits is their lungs) you cried Oh, it just makes me think of taking off somewhere with Dad

, and how I have used this car up like the first foolish wish of three

, and how the boy in the toll booth

window gathered my fare and asked ‘Are you all right?’

and I said ‘I’m alright are you alright?’

, and how

I said ‘there’s no end to it, is there?’ as the lad gathered my six tuppences,

turning away to the southbound

window, clicking the rush-hour rosary through his fingers, and saying

‘no end in sight–’