Earth House
Bloodaxe Books
Hardback, 112pp., 9781780375625 (27 April 2023) Ebook, 9781780375632 (27 April 2023) |
Longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry
Telegraph Poem of the Week Yorkshire Times Poem of the Week Tablet Summer Reading Traveller Featured Poem |
In Earth House, Matthew Hollis evokes the landscape, language and ecology of the isles of Britain and Ireland to explore how our most intimate moments have resonance in the wider cycle of life. Beginning in the slate waters of the north, the book revolves around the cardinal points and the ancient elements: through the wide skies of the east and the terrain of a southern city, to the embers of places lost to us, to which we can no longer return.
What emerges is a moving meditation on time and the transformative phases of nature that calls many forces into its presence – the wisdoms of Anglo-Saxon verse, the metamorphoses of Norse and Celtic myth, the stoicism of classical thought and the far east – unforgettably phrased by a writer who, in the words of the TLS, ‘makes the language of his poetry an event in itself’. Subtly attuned to the rhythms of the turning world, these poems open with the passing of an old life and culminate in the birth of a new one. They bravely work the seam between the present and the past, between destruction and renewal, humanity and our environment, and make Earth House a timeless exploration of our timed encounter with the remarkable lives of our planet.
What emerges is a moving meditation on time and the transformative phases of nature that calls many forces into its presence – the wisdoms of Anglo-Saxon verse, the metamorphoses of Norse and Celtic myth, the stoicism of classical thought and the far east – unforgettably phrased by a writer who, in the words of the TLS, ‘makes the language of his poetry an event in itself’. Subtly attuned to the rhythms of the turning world, these poems open with the passing of an old life and culminate in the birth of a new one. They bravely work the seam between the present and the past, between destruction and renewal, humanity and our environment, and make Earth House a timeless exploration of our timed encounter with the remarkable lives of our planet.
Bookshop.
Publisher | Alibris | Amazon UK | Blackwell's | Bookshop | Hive | Poetry Book Society | Waterstones | WH Smith | Wordery
Media.
Reviews. ‘A quietly magnificent book.’
‘A quietly magnificent book. Wholly lived. A magnificat in that way. Devoted to the austere and painful truths that poem by poem it discovers and quietly, as ever, magnifies. These poems sound a music like the warming subsong of a blackbird from the bare heart of a winter thorn, a cold cheer, a kindling blues.‘
– Tim Dee, author of Greenery
‘A magical combination of the delicate and the intense.’
– Julia Blackburn, author of Time Song
‘Enchanting . . . what good poems.‘
– Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield
‘A song of seasonal degeneration and rejuvenation . . . an incantatory rhythm that quietly but insistently interrogates the ecological future of the planet and laments the carelessness with which it is treated.’
– Dzifa Benson, The Poetry Review
‘Hollis writes with an unsentimental love of the natural world, in poems where landscapes he knows well are charged with a personal significance that’s often only hinted at.’
– Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph
‘The journey of body and mind in Matthew Hollis’ fine octet is as compelled and driven as a pilgrimage. Sewn seamlessly together, the gentle interchange of iambs and trochees makes footprints in the snow, actuating the measured rhythm of a trudge in the silence of a deluge without limit.’
– Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times
'a sweeping meditation on time, history, and our place in the natural world.'
– Maggie Wang, Poetry Book Society Bulletin
'This is poetry as music, as an oral and aural link to a past when the hedgerow and the fen were the world to some people. But it’s no mawkish lament for that time, it’s a hymn in its honour [. . .] that leaves the reader caught between savouring what the poet has just done and hungering for the next line. If it were a song on Spotify you’d have it on repeat.'
– Carl Tomlinson, The Friday Poem
'It’s taken Matthew Hollis 19 years to produce a successor to his debut collection, Ground Water, but Earth House was worth the wait. Well-nigh elemental in their evocation of time and landscape, the poems can have the effect of making their human protagonists look frail, marginal visitants to an indifferent world. At other times, particularly when Hollis returns to his native East Anglia, they are consummate exercises in psychogeography, where, however ancient the terrain, the people lead the dance.'
– D. J. Taylor, Tablet, Summer Reading
'Earth House is concerned with the ways our environment both roots and unroots us. Tied to the language, histories and ecology of Ireland and Britain, it is an elemental and expansive collection that builds from death to the birth of new life . . . If there is transcendence here it is to be found in the attention to the world around us, its nuance and fragility and our intimate connection to it, the“cleft between the chassis and the sea” . . . [It] provides the space and provocation for such reflections, opening up the cracks between things through which the light can shine.'
– Nikolai Duffy, Tablet
