Byssus

Byssuspronounced bissus and meaning the mussel''s beard the tough fibers which anchor it to the seabedis a book first and foremost about home and what it takes to find and forge one: amongst friends alert to mortality to love and to landscape. Her language strongly rooted in the common names she finds in the sea shore and moor of her adopted Shetland has already been widely admired for its startling originality. Here through poems of astonishment and adoration through charms and fables and ultimately through a practice of attention and careful honoringshe shows how speech itself can be an act of home-making. This is a profound consideration of just what it means to get to know a place.