Matthew Hollis

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.

Earth House is Matthew Hollis’s long awaited follow up to Ground Water (2004), shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Whitbread Poetry Award. He is the author of Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2011), winner of the Costa Award for Biography and Sunday Times Biography of the Year, and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022).

‘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.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Daily Telegraph (Poem of the Week)

‘The journey of body and mind in Matthew Hollis’ fine octet is as compelled and driven as a pilgrimage.’ – Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times, Poem of the Week, on 'The Long Snow' from Earth House

‘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

Praise for Ground Water

‘Matthew Hollis’s first collection of poems introduces us to his wonderfully elegant and assured voice. Comforting and enlightening by turn, these poems deal with some conventional issues of love and loss with a beauty and fluidity rare in young poets.’ – Whitbread Poetry Award judges

‘Matthew Hollis has put together a debut collection of striking accomplishment and emotional range.’ – The Guardian

‘The most interesting book of poems I read this year was Matthew Hollis’s Ground Water, a debut collection full of quietly evocative meditations on landscape and loss.’ – D.J. Taylor, The Spectator, Books of the Year

‘Affecting, redolent with sorrow but resolutely tough-minded.’ – David Harsent, Poetry Book Society Bulletin

‘Matthew Hollis shows an impressive confidence in the promptings of the imagination and no desire at all to ingratiate himself. Craft, not attitude, is what counts. Poems are sometimes called “quiet” when really they’re inaudible. His are genuinely quiet, drawing in the ear to enjoy, for example, his artful rendering in slowed folk-song rhythm of the terror and excitement of floods.’ – Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times

‘Hollis is a lyric poet, quietly musical, ever thoughtful.’ – Roddy Lumsden, Poetry London

‘Hollis’s language is often scrupulous and surprising: he relishes the words as he puts them down, without preening.’ – Anthony Thwaite, Daily Telegraph

‘Ground Water is never sentimental, a tribute to the author’s attention to the way in which he makes the language of his poetry an event in itself… it announces Matthew Hollis as a fascinating prospect.’ – Stephen Knight, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Also impressive is Matthew Hollis’s Ground Water, which draws on the flat, watery landscape of East Anglia to produce elegant poems of love and loss.’ – Christina Patterson, The Independent, Books of the Year
 

Praise for Leaves (included in Earth House)

‘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

‘Leaves is a moving meditation on the dynamics of a father/daughter relationship, set against the backdrop of autumn. In clear dialogue with Eliot’s Four Quartets, and laying bare the strange, mythic quality that lies under the surface of the everyday, it explores themes of departure and return, the loss and renewal of life, in musical sentences that pull us on mesmerically through to the pamphlet’s regenerative ending.’ – Michael Marks Pamphlet Award judges

Matthew Hollis: Ground Water

Matthew Hollis introduces and reads four poems from Ground Water: ‘Wintering’, ‘The Fielder’, ‘And let us say’ and ‘The Sour House’. He was teaching a residential poetry course with Anthony Dunn at Highgreen Manor next door to Bloodaxe’s former Tarset office in the summer of 2007 when we managed to grab him during a break in proceedings to read us the poems included in Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s film, which is from the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed & edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (2017). 

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