Jen Hadfield's latest collection, Byssus, takes its name from a mussel's 'beard', the fibres that anchor it to the seabed. As with her previous collections, much of Byssus is principally concerned with Shetland's landscape, although 'nature poetry' is too neat a term to describe it. Gorgeously realised and replete with original, peculiar images, Hadfield creates poems that hint at a kind of Wordsworthian sublime, yet without lapsing into romanticism, and meditations on home that are resolutely unsentimental.

The natural world is by no means new territory for Hadfield, and yet with Byssus, there is no sense that she is revisiting old ground. This is largely to do with her range of influences; her poems are teeming with Shakespearean, folkloric and pop culture references. Hadfield explained in a recent interview that she wanted her poetry 'to be honest about what speech is', a mixture of 'ancient words and new coinages'. Questions of language, its complexities, limitations and unwitting associations have informed much of her work. Wonderfully experimental, yet managing to remain unselfconsciously so, her startlingly fresh approach to landscape poetry has already garnered considerable praise. She was awarded an Eric Gregory Prize in 2003 for the manuscript of her first collection Almanacs (Bloodaxe, 2005), went on to receive the 2006 McLellan prize and the 2007 Dewar award, and her second collection Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe, 2008) was awarded the 2008 TS Eliot prize.

Hadfield's recurrent themes of home, place and belonging seem to constitute the 'byssus' of the title, anchoring the poet to her adopted Shetland. Almanacs was described by one critic as a series of 'dispatches'. There is certainly an element of this in Byssus; the poems serve as missives from Shetland, detailing its landscape, animals and inhabitants. The poems range from vast panoramas to detailed nature studies, moving from descriptions of cliffs and the distant sea, to the jewel-like minutiae of Shetland moors; in 'Da Coall' Hadfield describes the 'sappy nub; / violet bell; the minaret / of purpled bronze' of moor flowers, and puffballs are 'little white bulls'.

While Shetland is a source of constant inspiration, Hadfield is conscious of the problems that arise from fetishising landscape. In 'Ruined Croft, with Listening Station' Hadfield challenges the 'unfaithful act of composition', the transfiguration of nature into art. A response to Edwin Henry Landseer's painting On the Tilt, Perthshire, the poem was commissioned by the Manchester Art Gallery for an exhibition on Victorian views of Scottishness. Landseer's painting features a dilapidated barn by a stream, an idealised vision of rustic charm and remoteness. In her poem, however, Hadfield is careful to include the 'green dome of the listening station, / old relay installations, all those relics / of the Cold War', because to crop them out for aesthetic purposes would be to 'dispossess both the dead and the living'. As she explains:

Whilst it is fashionable to speak of the liminality of islands, with people titillated by the notion of them as World's End, a brink to teeter on; this world-view denies that for island-dwellers, they can be the centre. I wanted to dig down into this place, prospecting the infinitely-revealed complexities of 'home'.

Hadfield is at her best when exploring the 'complexities of home'. Not only does this mean showing the complete picture, telephone poles and plastic debris as well as dramatic promontories, but reacquainting the reader with things they thought they knew. In this she has that rare skill: the ability to make the subjects of her poems at once unusual and familiar. In 'Saturday Morning' frozen milk is 'blown up into a yellow bagpipe: a / rimed stone splitting its sides and burning your palms' while mushrooms are 'Mork eggs - / you Finns, you eyeless / Dia de Muertos/ skulls'. With her pairing of such disparate images Hadfield estranges the reader from the familiar and makes seemingly ordinary experiences appear vivid and unusual.

In earlier collections, Hadfield is sparing with her level of disclosure; there is nothing of the confessionalist in her poetry, and readers are only given rare glimpses of anything immediately personal. Byssus, however, begins to touch on this previously unexplored territory, the resulting poems intimate yet assured, as in 'Saturday Morning':

so wishing for a body to match yours that
you would even love your enemy, who for fuck's sake, holds
you, when you meet in this dream.

Several poems are darkly psychological, as with the remarkable sequence 'The Kids', which was awarded the Edwin Morgan Prize in 2012. A retelling of the nursery rhyme 'Monday's Child', the delicately unsettling poem is paired back, bare yet rich and strange. Saturday's child's eyes are 'lamps above her chin […] she can't help what she does or doesn't see - / salting away what she sees/ inside her' while Sunday's child 'knows what blasphemy is/ and where the devil's grave. /He makes lovely graves/ of long grass and speedwell.'

In the poem 'In Memoriam' Hadfield posits the question, 'are we taking up the first language / or must we coin / a new one?' There are many interesting considerations of language itself as Hadfield grapples with the ineptitude of metaphor: 'This unspeakable is not like / anything'. Her efforts to figure the 'unspeakable' take a number of different forms, and this collection is peppered with compounds and unorthodox capitalisations, as in 'The March Springs': 'Spring a hybrid / God, Gosh or Gum: dewlap bugling, bugling with glory; / spring-steam rolling off the whale-backed hill'.

Many poems are structurally experimental; some drift across the page, lines splintering off and scattering, their form redolent of concrete poetry, while others appear in more prosy, page-long blocks. Byssus has a careful, focused quality, certainly when compared to the bluesy beat rhythms sustained throughout Almanacs, or the transcendentalism of Nigh-No-Place. While Byssus is not without its challenging moments, there is much to recommend this remarkable collection, not least its sustained sense of immediacy and astonishment, which prove infectious.

Frith Taylor is a writer and researcher based in London. She is currently writing a PhD on 18th-century queer domesticity at Queen Mary University of London.

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