Publisher's Synopsis
Shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
Seaweed and sunburn. The death of a fridge. A ‘pie-faced’ St George upstaged by the horse.
The English Summer confronts the illusions and paradoxes of history in poems that reimagine medieval anchorites and 18th-century follies, zombies and the Megabus.
This is a landscape populated by overcrowded urban bedsits and burnt-out country piles, where ghosts of the past are sensed beneath dual carriageways and old gods emerge from rotting bindweed.
Visceral and analytic at turns, Hopkins’ startling collection probes at the undergrowth of English culture; a white-hot debut by a poet of singular vision.
'When I read a poem by Holly Hopkins, I feel as if I'm eavesdropping on the secrets of life itself - The English Summer shimmers with exquisite revelations. Whatever she writes about, whether it's global warming, a country church, or the death of a fridge, however down-to-earth the subject, there's a pin-sharp clarity, matched with a sleight of hand in the machinery of each poem, that gives us an original look at the world.' - Pascale Petit