‘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