Earth House
Bloodaxe Books
Hardback, 112pp., 9781780375625 (27 April 2023) Ebook, 9781780375632 (27 April 2023) Paperback, 9781780376226 (27 June 2024) |
Longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry
Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year Tablet Books of the Year BBC Radio 4 Extra Poetry Book of the Month Guardian Poem of the Week 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.
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Reviews.
‘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
‘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
‘The most attractive book I’ve held in a long time . . . His quietly distinguished, wise and elegant poems, on the earth and our fluid, unsettled place in it, are always a pleasure to spend time with . . . The impact is quietly devastating.’
– Nicola Healey, London Magazine
‘Earth House is a beautiful book . . . Myth and language keep the past ever-present for Hollis: his work is steeped in allusions to Anglo Saxon, Celtic and Norse myth, and richly textured with regional discourse, anchoring language both to history and place . . . a stunning collection.’
– Paul McDonald, London Grip
‘Earth House represents the ecological imagination at its most multi-layered and persuasive.’
– Carol Rumens, Guardian
‘Astonishing . . . I loved every page of these wise and unforgettable poems that celebrate human life and the natural world with phrase-making that stays on the ear long after the reading.’
– Dalit Nagra, Poetry Extra, BBC Radio 4 Extra
‘Attuned to the interconnections between landscape, language and ecology, Matthew Hollis’ Earth House is an astounding and deeply immersive collection that moves from elegiac loss to the birth of new life. Musical, layered and reflective, the poems magnify the environmental tremors we so often wreak in our wake, all the while suggesting the quiet possibility of another, more attentive way of being in the world, premised before anything on astonishment.’
– Nikolai Duffy, Tablet, Books of the Year
‘Matthew Hollis’s elemental yet cunningly wrought Earth House (Bloodaxe) was the best book of poems I read all year and a worthy successor to Ground Water, a debut that turns out to have appeared as long ago as 2004.’
– D. J. Taylor, Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year
‘There are books that I keep by me for a long time. Earth House will be one.’
– David Harsent, One Hand Clapping
'Hollis’s beautiful sophomore volume (after Ground Water) lyrically explores the essence of time, language, and ecology in poems about Britain and Ireland . . . highlighting Hollis’s superb gift for lyricism and imagery . . . With great sensitivity to language, Hollis reminds readers of the landscape’s ancient and renewing music.'
– Publishers' Weekly (US)
'If what has become known as ecopoetry emerged from the spiritual desolation that has followed from the destruction of the environment and the increasing certainty of catastrophe, Hollis . . . finds ironic correlates for the loss of nature in his textured witness to the remaining abundance of the countryside in Britain and Ireland and in the richness of the archaic diction and etymological wellsprings of the language he uses to describe it . . . The mastery of language is worn lightly, luminously, as part of the processes of life.'
– David Woo, Literary Hub (US)
