‘This book has been my friend’ – Amy Liptrot, bestselling author of The Outrun
‘I was transported’ – KATHERINE MAY, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WINTERING

‘Deeply thoughtful and beautifully written’ – SARAH MOSS, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SUMMERWATER

‘A book as exhilarating as a dip in wild winter waters’ – THE GUARDIAN

In her late twenties, poet Jen Hadfield moved to Shetland to make a new life. Here, in a rugged constellation of islands known for their isolation and drama, she found a place teeming with life, where rare seabirds blow in on Atlantic gales, an ancient language thrives, and a close-knit community is the beating heart of an entire world.

In Storm Pegs, Hadfield transports us to the islands as a local, introducing us to the remote and beautiful archipelago where she has made her home, and shows us new ways of living at the edge.

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 Gathering poems from across the poet’s four collections alongside previously unpublished material, Selected Poems is a generous offering from one of our foremost poets of the natural world.

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.