Earth woke you at an unshook rib.We had no books to base you on,we had no tools to pare you down,so incomplete,you were both catalogue and kit,the takings of a varied ground.All bones became your bones.We laid fibula to femur,radius to humerus,one hip crocked from female, one of male;our ivory, uncommon kid,from such modesty you stood.Light wounded, wind wounded.Water slipped from your sternum.You pined for the forest floor,you pined for your own kind;but there were no kinds like yours:so bit-part, out of epoch,mocked by those from nearer shore.We took them on and knocked them down—damned if they cast pity on your name—and wonderedwhat kind of kindness this could be,to leave you where you could be left,unwarranted to all but us,circling your roof of fire and straw.Night moves at the welter pools.The summer slips, the winter hoars.Eleven times the long hand crosses short;we go so far.One day the rings will slip from our fingers.But not from yours. Everythingwe almost are we lose. My animal,you cannot know how hard in love you are.
Animal
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Reprinted with permission from Earth House, Bloodaxe Books, 2023.
Matthew Hollis was born in Norwich, UK, in 1971. Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, 2011; W. W. Norton, 2012) won the Costa Biography Award and the H. W. Fisher Biography Prize. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Faber and Norton, 2022) was a book of the year in the Financial Times, New Statesman and Sunday Times. Earth House (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry. He is co-editor of The Poems of Seamus Heaney (Faber, 2025).
Longlisted for The Laurel Prize 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.
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).
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