Features the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the natural world. This book tells about the author's travel across Canada with a ravenous appetite for new landscapes. It tells that it is in Shetland that she becomes acutely aware of her own voice - her fluency and tongue-tiedness; repetition, hiatus and breath.

"Byssus"--pronounced "bissus," and meaning the mussel's "beard," the tough fibers which anchor it to the seabed--is 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 honoring--she shows how...