'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 '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".' - Nikolai Duffy, The Tablet 'This is poetry as music, as an oral and aural link to a past when the hedgerow and the fen were the world to some people . The poems and their characters face the world but relinquish any foolish resistance to it. We find their courage - and the world's presence - in quiet, shrewd metaphor, and deftly chosen, unexpected words.' - Carl Tomlinson, The Friday Poem , on Earth House 'Matthew Hollis's second collection blends the human and the natural in novel ways. a sweeping meditation on time, history, and our place in the natural world.
' - Maggie Wang, Poetry Book Society Bulletin 2023 '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) 'Myth and language keep the past ever-present for Hollis: his work is steeped in allusions to Anglo Saxon, Celtic and Norse myth, and richly textured with regional discourse, anchoring language both to history and place . a stunning collection.' - Paul McDonald, London Grip , on Earth House 'Affecting, redolent with sorrow but resolutely tough-minded.' - David Harsent, Poetry Book Society Bulletin 'Earth House by Matthew Hollis is contemplative, considered poetry.
Beneath its apparent quiet, I admire its strength, its echo & emotion.' - Katrina Naomi, Short & Sweet (Monthly Recommended Read) "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, The Sunday Times , on Ground Water 'An impressive debut.the metaphorical language is finely judged, touching both the landscapes and the people crawling its surface with a shrewd but never less than sympathetic gaze.' - D.
J. Taylor, The Guardian , on Ground Water.