The Stone Age (Picador, 80pp, £10.99), Jen Hadfield’s third collection, is an astonishing book. Cultivating a tactile, fully-inhabited vision of the Shetland landscape, it confirms Hadfield’s place amongst the finest poets writing today. As with Nigh-No-Place (2008) and Byssus (2014), The Stone Age is never squeamish, never rose-tinted, but has a dark, almost Rabelaisian undertow. There are subtle erotics to Hadfield’s poems here too, a sensory attention that leaps on occasion into exclamation. “Pleasure”, she writes, with a knowing wink, “is a kelp-hung arch, glittered / constantly by the licking of the wave.” These are poems the reader can plunge through.

Source: The Irish Times May 10, 2021 04:52 UTC