Recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry 2024, Jen Hadfield is increasingly recognized as one of the singular poetic voices of our time, admired for the sheer vitality of her style and 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Gathering poems from across the poet’s four collections alongside previously unpublished material, Selected Poems is a generous offering from one of our foremost poets of the natural world.
