Bøger af Jen Hadfield

A career retrospective from one of Britain's finest poets of the natural world.

A lyrical and dramatic collection of poems centered around Shetland from the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Byssus is Jen Hadfield's third collection, and her first after the T.S. Eliot prize-winning Nigh-No-Place. Byssus - pronounced 'bissus', and meaning the mussel's 'beard', the tough fibres which anchor it to the seabed - is a book first and foremost about home, and what it takes to find and forge one: amongst friends, alert to mortality, to love and to landscape. Her language, strongly rooted in the common names she finds in the sea, shore and moor of her adopted Shetland, has already been widely admired for its startling originality. Here, through poems of astonishment and adoration, through charms and fables, and ultimately through a practice of attention and careful honouring - she shows how speech itself can be an act of home-making. Byssus is a profound consideration of just what it means to get to know a place.

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2008, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The language of Jen Hadfield's poetry is one of incantation and secular praise.

Almanacs: a mythic scrapbook, bag of cats, a one-man band...Jen Hadfield's Almanacs is concerned with lists, rules and archetypes and what they don't account for. It takes as its subjects the Tarot, the lore of Full Moons, weather myths and travellers' tales. The book's central sequence, Lorelei's Lore, is a road movie in poems, set in the north of Scotland: Ultima Thule, hijacked by elusive sirens and Harrier jets. There's the ruthless Lorelei, gorgeous Ghosty who's given up on everything except the Road, and Skerryman, patron saint of bad weather and absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder. It's obsessed with yearning, like the two seas separated by the tip of Shetland 'metres apart/and desperate for each other.' Lorelei's Lore wonders 'what's beautiful?' (tarmac? sheep carcasses? sunburn?) and 'where's your native home?'