The Stone Age
Published on 18. March 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-5290-3734-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
There is something magical and incantatory in the way she cherished 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. * New Statesman * Shetland-based Jen Hadfield provides a vivid portrait of the landscape of her home, while also showing how neurodiversity can lead to new slants, insights and metaphors when viewing the world. . . What's most captivating is how Hadfield brings sensations to life; subtle and propulsive, her language fizzes and dashes "in little surges like rills of clear pleasure" * Guardian * 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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Pan Macmillan
Target group
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 153 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
132 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5290-3734-0 (9781529037340)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jen Hadfield lives in Shetland. Her first collection, Almanacs, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003. Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition in 2012.