Byssus

Byssus is Jen Hadfield's third collection, and her first after the T.S. Eliot prize-winning Nigh-No-Place. Byssus - the name for the strong silk that a mussel uses to root itself to a rock - is an unsurprisingly rich and various collection, but a book first and foremost about home, and what it takes to find and forge one.

Through praise poems, love poems, charms and fables, Hadfield shows how speech itself affords us a means to inhabit and merge with a landscape, through a practice of attention and careful honouring. Her language, strongly anchored in the common names she finds in the sea, shore and moor of her adopted Shetland, has already been admired for its startling originality. But Byssus is not a book content to reflect and meditate: Hadfield has made strange new objects to place among the natural, and the book builds to a profound consideration on who and what we are, exactly, within the natural landscape.