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. ‘Matthew Hollis’s elemental yet cunningly wrought  Earth House  was the best book of poems I read all year and a worthy successor to  Ground Water , a debut that turns out to have appeared as long ago as 2004.’  – D. J. Taylor,  The Times Literary Supplement  (Books of the Year 2023) 'Hollis’s beautiful sophomore volume (after  Ground Water ) lyrically explores the essence of time, language, and ecology in poems about Britain and Ireland. The book is thoughtfully and effectively divided around the four cardinal points, beginning in the north […] With great sensitivity to language, Hollis reminds readers of the landscape’s ancient and renewing music.'  –  Publishers Weekly , on  Earth House ‘If what has become known as ecopoetry emerged from the spiritual desolation that has followed from the destruction of the environment and the increasing certainty of catastrophe, Hollis, an English poet whose second collection arrives nearly two decades after his acclaimed first, finds ironic correlates for the loss of nature in his textured witness to the remaining abundance of the countryside in Britain and Ireland and in the richness of the archaic diction and etymological wellsprings of the language he uses to describe it … the mastery of language is worn lightly, luminously, as part of the processes of life…'  – David Woo,  Literary Hub , on  Earth House ‘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 a