I
1. Causeway 5
2. The Sea Stick 6
3. Beck 8
4. Wastwater 9
5. A White Hart at Sykeside 10
6. All there ever is 12
7. Call 13
8. Stones 14
9. The Long Snow 21
Lone 22
II
1. Anglia 27
2. Iken 28
3. A Harnser for James 29
4. Winterton Ness 32
5. I will lift up my eyes 34
6. Where narrow water widens 36
7. The Island 37
8. Rooks 38
9. The Staithe 41
Deor 42
III
1. The Blackbird of Spitalfields 47
2. The Diomedes 48
3. Commute 49
4. Losing Time 50
5. Animal 52
6. The Collect 54
7. The Fox Runner 56
8. Leaves 57
9. A Bluebird for Rose 67
Wulf 68
IV
1. West 71
2. A Red Hairband in Iveragh 72
3. Cara 74
4. Four Roads 75
5. Landlock 76
6. The Mansion 78
7. Hedge Bird 79
8. Havener 80
9. Headland 89
Ruin 90
Place notes 93
Matthew Hollis was born in 1971 in Norwich, and now lives in London. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1999. He is co-editor of 101 Poems Against War (Faber, 2003) and Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), and editor of the Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (Faber, 2011). He is Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber. After its shortlisting for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, his first full-length collection Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award (the first time for a poetry book) and for the Whitbread Poetry Award. Ground Water was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His second book-length collection, Earth House, was published by Bloodaxe in 2023 and longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023. His biography, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber, 2011), won the Costa Biography Award, the H.W. Fisher Biography Award and a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, and was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Biography of the Year. His second "biography", The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, was published by Faber in 2022. Matthew Hollis was Poetry Editor at Faber from 2012 to 2023.
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.
*The Tablet (Summer Reading)*
Some poets take their time. Matthew Hollis’s second collection
Earth House arrives this week 19 full years after his acclaimed
debut Ground Water. In the meantime, Hollis has written a well
received biography of Edward Thomas, whose poetry is a marked
influence on his own. Like Thomas, 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.
*The Daily Telegraph (Poem of the Week)*
Matthew Hollis’s 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'.
*The Tablet*
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