Nigh-No-Place

Summary

Immersed in the dramatic, wind scoured landscape of the Shetland Islands, these poems blend dialect words and local ecology with a fresh outsider's curiosity to create a voice that is wholly distinctive. Hadfield's poetry is intensely physical — she is alert to texture, weather, and the specific weight of things — and her outsider relationship to her adopted landscape gives the work an alertness that a native poet might not achieve. She was, at 30, the youngest winner in the prize's history.