Matthew Hollis Readings
‘Matthew Hollis’s elemental yet cunningly wrought Earth House 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, The Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year 2023)
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. Earth House was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023 for nature and ecopoetry.
Earth House was published by Bloodaxe in hardback on 27 April 2023. A paperback edition was published in June 2024. Matthew gave an in-person launch reading at Newcastle Poetry Festival in May 2023, and has since read from Earth House at a number of festivals including Ledbury Poetry Festival, Winchester Poetry Festival and Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
Matthew Hollis' debut Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is co-editor, with W.N. Herbert, of Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and 101 Poems Against War (Faber & Faber, 2003), and editor of Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, 2011). He is the author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Faber & Faber, UK, Norton, US, 2022). Now All Roads Lead to France: the Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, UK, 2011; Norton, US, 2012) won the Costa Biography Award and the H. W. Fisher Biography Prize, was Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Biography of the Year. He was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber from 2012 to 2023.
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Matthew Hollis's poem 'The Diomedes' from Earth House was featured by Carol Rumens in her online Poem of the Week column in The Guardian of 9 October 2023. Read here.
'Hollis’s collection is impressively structured, each of its four sections composed as an itinerary that always comes “home” to anchor in an original translation from The Exeter Book. The places and insights the poet experiences at the cardinal points are fluid, interconnected, never insular. Longlisted for the 2023 Laurel prize, Earth House represents the ecological imagination at its most multi-layered and persuasive.' – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian
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‘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, The Tablet (Books of the Year 2023)
'The poems draw on aspects of nature and natural effects – those mysteries – to reckon with the way human (that is interpersonal) dramas seem evidenced by weather and the rigours of landscape. There are books that I keep by me for a long time. Earth House will be one.' – David Harsent, One Hand Clapping (Christmas 2023 Issue)
‘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.’ – D. J. Taylor, The Tablet (Summer Reading)
PAST EVENTS
Matthew Hollis reads from Earth House at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Matthew Hollis reads five poems from Earth House: 'A Harnser for James', The Diomedes', 'A Red Hairband in Iveragh', 'Deor' and 'Causeway'.
Bloodaxe Books online launch reading, April 2023
Launch reading with Harry Clifton, Maura Dooley and Matthew Hollis celebrating the publication of their new poetry collections. Matthew read last in each set.
The poets read live and discussed their new collections with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available to watch via this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/7Zl2Sy9rzLk
[22 April 2023]
