Selected Poems - by Jen Hadfield (Paperback)

About the Book

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

Book Synopsis

Recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry 2024

Jen Hadfield is increasingly recognized as one of the singular poetic voices of our time, admired for the sheer vitality of her style and for her devotion to the natural world. Selected Poems offers a welcome retrospective, charting her development from the youthful wanderlust of Almanacs, through the incantatory praise songs of Nigh-No-Place for which she became the youngest ever winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Hadfield's poetics are rooted in a panpsychist kinship with the non-human - a keen sensitivity to the consciousness that surrounds us, as she coaxes into language the essence of each thing. Nowhere is this more evident than in her rapt dialogue with the Shetland archipelago, translating its wild and abundant beauty, its idiosyncrasies and mythologies. 'Home', she writes, 'is about using poetry to fashion myself a bivouac in the here and now, against the continual losses of the present tense'. Gathering poems from across the poet's four collections alongside previously unpublished material, Selected Poems is a generous offering from one of our foremost poets of the natural world.

Review Quotes

"Hadfield brings sensations to life; subtle and propulsive, her language fizzes and dashes" --Rishi Dastidar on The Stone Age, The Guardian

"[Storm Pegs] is a bewitching book, tactile and immersive, riven with salt winds, alive with human oddities and loud with the cries of seabirds. Everything glows in the light of Hadfield's words, from slimy sea molluscs to grand island vistas." --The Telegraph

"There are as many creatures as people in Nigh-No-Place, and poems are more like brilliant snapshots than whole, poised works. The writing is all the better for this manifestation of energy . . . Hadfield's refreshing voice carries all the way from the top of Scotland to blow some of the dust off British verse." --Stephen Knight on Nigh-No-Place, The Independent

"There is something magical and incantatory in the way she cherishes language at the level of the name, as if utterance itself might be a way of dwelling in the real and making oneself at home there" --The New Statesman

"The Stone Age transports us to the bleakly beautiful landscape of Shetland, where she lives. Hers is an uncompromising eye which sees Soul in everything . . . Strange and challenging, these poems demand as much attention as the poet gives her world." --Daily Mail

About the Author

Jen Hadfield is a poet and visual artist living in Shetland. Her first collection, Almanacs, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003 and her second, Nigh-No-Place, won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2008, making her the youngest female poet to receive the award. Her Picador collections are Byssus, published in 2014, and The Stone Age, winner of the Highland Book Prize in 2022. Jen Hadfield's prose memoir Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland appeared from Picador in 2024. She is a 2024 recipient of a Windham Campbell Prize for her poetry.