|
Showing 1 - 6 of
6 matches in All Departments
Winner of the 2021 Highland Book Prize Jen Hadfield’s new
collection is an astonished beholding of the wild landscape of her
Shetland home, a tale of hard-won speech, and the balm of the
silence it rides upon. The Stone Age builds steadily to a powerful
and visionary panpsychism: in Hadfield’s telling, everything –
gate and wall, flower and rain, shore and sea, the standing stones
whose presences charge the land – has a living consciousness, one
which can be engaged with as a personal encounter. The Stone Age is
a timely reminder that our neurodiversity is a gift: we do not all
see the world the world in the same way, and Hadfield’s lyric
line and unashamedly high-stakes wordplay provide nothing less than
a portal into a different kind of being. The Stone Age is the work
of a singular artist at the height of her powers – one which
dramatically extends and enriches the range of our shared
experience.
'Luminous' The Times 'Beautiful' Caught by the River Bringing
together contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape,
this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming,
from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back
gardens, through prose, poetry and photography. Edited and
introduced by Kathleen Jamie, and with contributions from Amy
Liptrot, Jim Crumley, Chitra Ramaswamy, Malachy Tallack, Amanda
Thomson and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our
relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by
turns celebratory, radical and political.
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. Her first book, "Almanacs", was a traveller's litany,
featuring a road movie in poems set in the north of Scotland.
"Nigh-No-Place" is the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the
natural world. Hadfield began her new book on the hoof, travelling
across Canada with a ravenous appetite for new landscapes. She took
epic routes: the railway line from Halifax to Vancouver and the
Dempster Highway's 740 km of gravel road, ending in the Arctic
oiltowns of Inuvik and Tuktoyuktuk. But it is in Shetland that she
becomes acutely aware of her own voice - her fluency and
tongue-tiedness; repetition, hiatus and breath. "Nigh-No-Place"
reflects the breadth of ground she's covered. 'Ten-minute Break
Haiku' is her response to working in a fish factory. 'Paternoster'
is the Lord's Prayer uttered by a draught-horse. 'Prenatal Polar
Bear' takes place in Churchill, Manitoba, surrounded by tundra.
|
Almanacs (Paperback)
Jen Hadfield
|
R291
R230
Discovery Miles 2 300
Save R61 (21%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
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?'
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.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R310
Discovery Miles 3 100
|