Love's Dog — Jen Hadfield (2008)

Jen Hadfield is a Shetland-based poet whose collection Nigh-No-Place (2008) won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2008, making her the youngest poet ever to have done so. Hadfield's writing is rooted in landscape and in a voice that is both precise and playful. Love's Dog is one of her most anthologised pieces: a small, blunt list-poem that organises love into two columns — what the speaker loves about love, and what the speaker does not.

The poem matters in the Edexcel cluster because it presents love as a genuinely mixed experience. It is not a poem of declaration (I Wanna Be Yours), nor a poem of definition (Sonnet 116), nor a poem of anti-cliché (Valentine). It is a poem of honest ambivalence.

Context

Aspect	Detail
Poet	Jen Hadfield (1978–)
Collection	Nigh-No-Place, 2008
Period	Contemporary
Form	List poem; paired "what I love / what I don't" stanzas
Setting	Implied domestic / relational

Hadfield writes in a post-Heaney, post-Duffy mode: short lines, precise images, colloquial warmth. Her poems often handle emotion with a mixture of plainness and strangeness — you trust the voice because it does not seem to be performing.

Short summary

The speaker lists the things she loves about love: particular bodily details, particular small intimacies, particular pleasures of being in a relationship. She also lists the things she doesn't love: particular disappointments, small betrayals, the costs of being with someone. The two lists run alongside each other. Love is neither denounced nor exalted; it is inventoried.

Voice and speaker

The speaker is first-person, contemporary, honest and sparing. The voice sounds private — as if the reader is overhearing the speaker make a list for herself. There is no addressee. This is not a love-poem written to be read by the beloved; it is a reckoning.

Form and structure

Feature	Detail
Form	List poem
Structure	Paired stanzas — "what I love" / "what I don't love"
Lines	Short, often very short
Rhyme	Light or absent
Movement	Accumulation by contrast

graph LR
  A[What I love: small tender items] --> C[The mixed portrait]
  B[What I don't love: small bitter items] --> C

The juxtaposition is the poem's engine. The reader is constantly pushed from a positive line to a negative line and back. That structure enacts the central argument: love is both at once.

Language and imagery

List as catalogue. The list is an ancient poetic form — Whitman made it modern, Duffy and Hadfield have refreshed it. In a list poem, accumulation is argument. Each item is small; the weight is cumulative.

The small physical detail. Hadfield is a poet of particular things, and the lines that catch in memory tend to be concrete: a knuckle, a smell, a phrase, a morning habit. Love is in the details.

Binary structure. The "what I love" / "what I don't love" pairing is binary in arrangement but not in meaning — the two lists do not cancel each other out. They coexist. Love in Hadfield's account is a field of mixed weather.

Colloquial register. The diction is plain, nearly conversational. There are no elaborate metaphors. The poem sounds as though it were written in a notebook — though the craft beneath that appearance is considerable.

Themes

Theme	How it operates
Love's ambivalence	Love is simultaneously treasured and resented
Honesty	The poem refuses idealisation
Ordinariness	Love is registered in small everyday details
The private inventory	The poem is a reckoning, not a declaration
Form as argument	The list structure stages coexistence

A sophisticated reading recognises that the poem's honesty is itself a kind of love. Rather than pretending the difficult parts away, Hadfield's speaker names them — and in naming both sides, stays in the relationship rather than leaving it.

Suggested comparison partners

Partner	Shared ground	Productive contrast
Valentine	Honest, anti-cliché love	Duffy commits to one metaphor; Hadfield to multiple
I Wanna Be Yours	Contemporary list form	Cooper Clarke lists what he offers; Hadfield lists what she finds
One Flesh	Honest look at a relationship	Jennings observes others; Hadfield inventories her own

Worked paragraph

Both Hadfield's Love's Dog and Duffy's Valentine refuse romantic cliché and insist on honesty about love, but they use different structural strategies to do it. Hadfield works by list: paired short items under "what I love" and "what I don't love" that accumulate into a portrait of love as mixed weather. The binary form is, paradoxically, anti-binary — the lists do not cancel, they coexist. Duffy, by contrast, commits to a single extended metaphor — the onion — and pushes it through escalations from tenderness to danger, closing on the single word "Lethal". Both poets work in free verse; both use short, declarative lines; both treat love as real. But Hadfield's honesty is inventory — she is making a list of what love is, both pleasant and painful — while Duffy's honesty is argument, pushing a single image hard enough to make it say everything. Read together, they show two contemporary English approaches to writing a love poem without slipping into cliché.

Key quotations to memorise

(Memorise exact wording from your anthology.)

• An opening item from the "what I love" list.
• An opening item from the "what I don't love" list.
• A line where the two columns run tight together.
• A particularly concrete physical detail.
• The closing lines — does the poem end on positive, negative, or balance?

Extended worked paragraph — comparison with One Flesh

Both Hadfield's Love's Dog and Jennings's One Flesh render mixed, unglamorous views of love, but they do so from different speaker-positions and with different structural tools. Hadfield works inside a relationship, listing what she loves about love alongside what she does not in paired short items whose accumulation is the argument: love is a field of mixed weather, simultaneously treasured and resented, and the binary form — paradoxically — stages coexistence rather than cancellation. Jennings works outside a relationship, observing her parents from the position of an adult daughter: her parents are "strangers now", "apart yet side by side", and the three six-line stanzas pace the recognition slowly without climax. Both poets refuse to idealise; both treat love-poetry as a form of honest reckoning rather than celebration. But Hadfield's inventory is of her own relationship, while Jennings's is of someone else's; Hadfield's honesty is chosen and active, Jennings's honesty is observational and patient. Read together they show two contemporary English strategies for the anti-idealising love poem: the first-person inventory and the third-person observation. An examiner in Band 4 or 5 rewards a paragraph that compares speaker-position and structural choice rather than only theme.

Grade 4 vs Grade 6 vs Grade 9 — "How does Hadfield present love in Love's Dog?"

Grade 4. Hadfield presents love as both good and bad. She writes a list of what she likes and what she doesn't like. The list shows that love has two sides. She is being honest about love not being perfect.