The Stone Age

(Paperback)

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Description

Longlisted for 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.

Reviews

"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

Author Bio

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.