Byssus

by Jen Hadfield

A brilliant new poetry collection 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-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.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2014

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intelligent, emotional book full of muscular and surprising language, this gives me all I look for from nature poetry. Hadfield's adopted home is Shetland, and these poems are full of the language of the Shetlands, evoking the sounds of the islands and the voices of those who live there. Hadfield shows us how the words we use create who we are and how we understand the world around us. Her poetry is sinuous, full of strong, surprising images of cliffs, wind, pigs, furrows, sea, mushrooms, bivalves, all of which she looks at with a direct, unsparing gaze, but also wit and humour. Startling images such as in her poem, "Hairst" (autumn), capture our attention:

Ringing unanswered on the cliff,
like an old black bakelite
phone, the raven

She sometimes includes more than one poem about a particular thing, such as mackerel or puffballs, showing that even the smallest parts of nature have multiple facets and ways of being. Puffballs are "a broken string / of irregular peals / packed with cool, // white roe" in a concrete poem that scatters the puffballs' spoors across the page, and, in another poem, they are herded by "the moon" "through the mold / like little white bulls". In Hadfield's poems, nature is not always a place of beauty or solace: the things she writes about are very much themselves -- pigs, in "Gloriana", view humans as strange servants, who are given the opportunity to tend to them, as the pigs say, "you shall rest against the royal bellypork, and scratch the bearded royal jaw, which recalls the Tudor" or the cat in, "The Black Hole", who "biffs" a robin's carcass, "crunching into the ginger-nut / of its breast". The poems are always in dialogue with the human and animal populations of the Shetlands, and those who have drawn inspiration from the islands before Hadfield. This is a rich, musical collection, full of life and the constant changes of the sea. Highly recommended.

[Charlotte Latham · Rating 3 out of 5]

The images in these poems didn't really come alive for me.

[Mandy Haggith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jen is a uniquely brilliant poet. Her poems sparkle with fun, and she makes you look afresh at the world over and over again.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at place through the narrative of poetry. Some delightful poems.

[scarlettraces · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5)