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. . . <b>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”</b>
Guardian
THE STONE AGE transports us to the bleakly beautiful landscape of Shetland, where she lives. Hers is an <b>uncompromising eye</b> which sees Soul in everything. . . <b>Strange and challenging, these poems demand as much attention as the poet gives her world.</b>
Daily Mail
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.