Additional information
by Matthew Hollis (Author)
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 and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, recipients of the Costa Award for Biography and Sunday Times Biography of the Year.
Author Biography
Matthew Hollis was born in Norwich in 1971, and now lives in London. 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. In 2016 he published two limited letterpress and hand-made pamphlets, Stones (Incline Press) and East (Clutag Press). His second book-length collection, Earth House, is published by Bloodaxe in 2023. His biography, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber, UK, 2011; Norton, US, 2012), 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: The Biography of a Poem, was published by Faber in the UK and Norton in the US in 2022. He is also co-editor of Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), and editor of the Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (Faber, 2011).
