Selima Hills twenty-second collection A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus presents ten sequences of short poems, prose poems and short pieces on relationships and doings between people, animals and the world at large:
Self-portrait with a Bucket: On being an artists model.
The Mathematician: A man and woman trying to agree.
A Man, a Woman & a Chihuahua: Different peoples senses of bafflement with each other.
Baby Peter: A homeless man and his mother.
Agatha: An afternoon in a care home.
Room 17: A 70-year-old woman, baffled but determined.
Men in Shorts and Bonkers: Out walking with dogs and their humans.
Until the Tears Roll Down My Cheeks like Honey: Two strangers in a field.
The Surly Mothers of Successful Men: Short pieces of memoir.
Recenzijos
The miniaturism of Martial and Emily Dickinson is reinvented in this iridescent collection which brings together 11 sequences whose subjects range from girls misbehaving in convent schools to fridges contemplating death, plus a pair of bad-tempered sisters, a parrot and hair clips... Over 254 pages, Hill creates a new kind of narrative poem, which has all the rewards of reading a good novel or novels yet she retains poetrys unique ability to zoom in on minutiae, as when contemplating ants whizzing about like bumper cars... -- Philip Terry * The Guardian (The best recent poetry) on Women in Comfortable Shoes * Selima Hill is an inimitable talent. The mind is fragile and unreliable in her poetry, but is also tenacious and surprising, capable of the most extraordinary responses, always fighting back with language as its survival kit. Life in general might be said to be her subject, the complications, contradictions and consequences of simply existing. Nevertheless, Hills writing is eminently readable and approachable, even fun at times, the voice of a person and a poet who will not be quieted and will not conform to expectations, especially poetic ones. -- Simon Armitage * Poet Laureate, on behalf of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry Committee * This is the twenty-first poetry collection from the unstoppable Selima Hill. These days she tends to present her work as sequences of small poems, some extremely minimal. Women in Comfortable Shoes consists of eleven such sequences. Their power lies not so much in the individual poems as in the cumulative, immersive effect of each sequence, and in Hills charismatic voice which seizes attention from the get-go I seem to see the world more vividly and sense it more intensely after reading Selima Hill, and this highly readable collection is no exception. She shakes things up and wakes up your mind like no other poet. Shed probably hate to hear me saying this but genius! -- Annie Fisher * The Friday Poem *
Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters on farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 40 years. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1986, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University in 2003-06. She won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition with part of The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1989), one of several extended sequences in Gloria: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which also includes work from Saying Hello at the Station (1984), My Darling Camel (1988), A Little Book of Meat (1993), Aeroplanes of the World (1994), Violet (1997), Bunny (2001), Portrait of My Lover as a Horse (2002), Lou-Lou (2004) and Red Roses (2006). Violet was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UKs major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Bunny won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lou-Lou and The Hat were Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe Books are The Hat (2008); Fruitcake (2009); People Who Like Meatballs (2012), shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award; The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism (2014); Jutland (2015), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation which was shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize and was earlier shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize; The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016), shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017; Splash like Jesus (2017); I May Be Stupid But I'm Not That Stupid (2019); and Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022; and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her 22nd book of poetry, A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.
Selima Hill was awarded The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022, made on the basis of her body of work, with special recognition for her 2008 Bloodaxe Books retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems.
