Carl Tomlinson reviews Earth House by Matthew Hollis (Bloodaxe, 2023)
Cover blurb is a risky way into any book, and poetry cover blurb perhaps doubly so. But it’s hard to avoid as a reviewer. Publishers send out a press release with the review copy and it feels churlish not to glance at it, even if we suspect some of it might be matey log-rolling or an opportunity for the blurber to show off their own unique insight. (I’m not trying to storm the moral high ground here, my own mentor wrote some blurb for my pamphlet.) But what’s the reviewer to do? Echo the eminent, collude with the colleague, or push back against the encomia? All of these minor irritations fell away when I read Ronald Blythe’s words on the back of Earth House. “Enchanting … what good poems.” Blythe, himself no mean writer of place, must have been close to the end of his very long, very productive life when he summoned the energy to say that, and if he thinks the poems are worth a look then I will take his word for it.
Having swerved the blurb hurdle, I put the book to the Buckley test. My good friend, and fellow Frip reviewer, Alan Buckley claims that it’s worth buying a collection if – when you thumb it in the bookshop – you find three poems which make you want to read more. It might seem like a low bar until we consider how few poems truly do that to us. And, if the average poetry book costs the same as two or three decent cups of coffee, and the average poetry reader gains as much enjoyment from a good poem as from a good cup of their favourite beverage, then it’s also sound economics. Whatever, it’s a bar which a handful of recent collections sent to me by the editor failed to clear. In fact, I’m not sure they had three poems between them which passed that test. Lots of invention, lots of risk taking, lots of variety, yes, but also too many poems trying too hard to be more than a poem and ending up as less than one. So I was ready to be enchanted by good poems.
Here, not entirely at random, are three from Earth House which prove both Blythe and Buckley right.
‘Causeway’
Yes, it’s the first poem. But if the front door isn’t inviting, why go in? Tim Dee’s blurb suggests that Hollis has “a voice and vision somewhere between” (his biographical subjects) T.S. Eliot and Edward Thomas. Here the presiding spirt seems closer to the Heaney of ‘Postscript’, especially in a line like: “But halfway out the destination ceases to be the prize”.
If the front door isn’t inviting, why go in?
If you decided to buy this book on the basis of this poem you’d be rewarded with yet more closely formed poems. Here, the calm couplets seem to hold back the tide from the Lindisfarne causeway. You’d encounter more lines that do two (or more) things perfectly, like “our licence brief, unlikely to be renewed”, which speaks both to the writer’s fleeting visit to Bede’s backyard and to our own sparrow’s flight through the mead hall of life. You’d find a painterly eye for landscape:
to the north, a hovering headland,
to the south, a shoal of light –
and – if you were in the mood to be picky – you might pick up warnings of an occasional Eliot-like sententiousness in “that clean division which the heart rages for”, before being reassured by the gentle music of the poem’s closing rhyme.
‘A Harnser for James’
Here we encounter Hollis and his five-year-old son crabbing, the child’s “young hands harrying the line” in a “world so slow to reward” and “too subtle [for the child’s] engineering”. This is a poem about deep time and the gentle accretion of lore in landscapes which drift with tide and current. A harnser, we learn, is an East Anglian dialect word for heron, it’s a word
[…] worn at the ear
passed in playgrounds and childhood towns:
That double meaning of worn feels like a tide-polished pebble that we want to rub and nestle into our palm. Hollis then takes the plunge and gives us very nearly a whole page of mostly unglossed dialect terms (though he does explain these in the notes). 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. But it’s no mawkish lament for that time, it’s a hymn in its honour. He’s not trying to hold back the tide of time in this estuary, indeed he vows to his son that “[o]ther days will come within your calling”. The poem ends with an effortless (as in unforced – I’m sure he put the work in) return to the crabbing
[…] stay with me,
if you can, you will take up the line.
That one word “line” does three things. It’s the actual crab line; it’s genealogy; and it’s that music again. This is a poem that leaves the reader caught between savouring what the poet has just done and hungering for the next line. If it were a song on Spotify you’d have it on repeat.
‘A Harnser for James’ illustrates Dee’s point perfectly. It is delicately balanced between Thomas’s gently allusive style and Eliot’s occasionally unnecessary elusiveness. Other poems, particularly ‘Stones’, sometimes take on board rather more of the latter than I enjoy.
‘Rooks’
This book is scrupulously structured. Each of its four sections contains nine numbered (and titled) poems and a un-numbered coda. There are copious and helpful Place Notes at the end which situate the poems in their place and time of conception.
The eighth poem of each section is noticeably longer than the others, many of which don’t fill a page. Hollis wins our trust with a selection of finely woven samples then unrolls a tapestry which enables him to turn ideas over at length. ‘Stones’ is one of these. ‘Rooks’ is perhaps the most consistently successful.
The first section is a brooding reflection on a recovery from illness, or perhaps only a remission. Hollis has an ear for quiet unanswerable observation:
When the mark is lifted from your body,
the ghost chased from beneath your skin,
and we learn, as every living creature must,
to heal again,
It is, after all, only the dead who get to give up. The line break on “again” draws our ear to the difference between healing, and healing again. Here, as elsewhere, a single word is doing a great deal of work.
Further on we are dared “to do nothing to prevent” the “[n]ight [coming] nearer each night” since all there is to be done is “laying down our upper hand / and facing into the whelm”. This is the essence of the collection, both morally and poetically. 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.
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
The second and third sections scatter words across the page rather like some of those previously mentioned writers who left me cold. Except here they are describing the flight of rooks at dusk. And here too there is order in the writing. “[C]ards”, “cries”, “draw” and “come” all give us the cawing of the rookery which Hollis never actually enunciates. So, perversely, does “calm”.
And, as the rooks fold into their roosts and the watchers fold into the night, the poem shows us both the power and futility of metaphor as “we fumble for familiarity: recalling the likeness / that is not a likeness”. Here Hollis earns the right to stare us in the face and ask, directly,
Why will the mind
make one thing like another
when some marks won’t compare
Because, this reader would reply, that’s how the enchantment works. That’s where the good poems emerge.
Carl Tomlinson lives on a smallholding in Oxfordshire. He works as a business coach and virtual finance director. His work been published online, in anthologies, and in Orbis, South, The Hope Valley Journal and The Alchemy Spoon. His debut pamphlet Changing Places was published in 2021 by Fair Acre Press.
