The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022
Selima Hill’s 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 artist’s model.
The Mathematician: A man and woman trying to agree.
A Man, a Woman & a Chihuahua : Different people’s 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.
'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 poetry’s 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
‘Her poems resist analysis. Short, precise and startling, funny in both senses, they make everything else look like pretentious waffle… Hill is especially good at capturing young girls’ voices, a strength of the early sequences here, in a book that charts a kind of Seven Ages of Woman … Selima Hill is a great poet.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph (Poetry Book of the Month), on Women in Comfortable Shoes
‘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 Hill’s 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. She’d probably hate to hear me saying this but – genius!’ – Annie Fisher, The Friday Poem
'A lovely and generous book this if you enjoy Selima Hill’s wry sense of humour and surreal approach to difficult subjects. Her latest is a collection of eleven sequences of poems and is a masterclass in how to tie poems together with imagery and motif ... Hill’s collection demonstrates how the pitch perfect short poem can be woven into a series of troubling woman-centred tales. It is a rewarding read, one to be returned to often.' – Kate Noakes, London Grip
'Surging with shrieks of pain and howls of laughter, these poems transform life’s inevitable mundanities into the fizziest, memorable moments.' – Jo Clement, PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2023, on Women in Comfortable Shoes , a Poetry Book Society Recommendation
'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, Hill’s 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
‘Hill’s writing has always been characterized by her original approach to the image. Her images are always three dimensional, like sculptures. We don’t just see them, we feel them, too [...] Hill’s most recent book, Women in Comfortable Shoes , comprises eleven sequences—atypical of the shape of much of her work, which is often made up of many short poems grouped together to form a kind of fragmented narrative [...] These fictionalized narrative frameworks seem to allow Hill the distance to avoid exposure of the self, while also giving her the freedom to explore aspects of the female experience.’ – Kim Moore, Poetry Magazine
Selima Hill: Women in Comfortable Shoes
Selima Hill reads a selection of short poems from eight of the eleven sequences in Women in Comfortable Shoes : ‘Fishface’, ‘My Friend Weasel’, ‘Susan and Me’, ‘Dolly’, ‘My Mother with a Beetle in Her Hair’, ‘Fridge’, ‘The Chauffeur’ and ‘Dressed and Sobbing’. Neil Astley filmed her reading in the octagonal Garden Tower in Dorset in May 2023.
Octagonal Readings: Selima Hill reads from eight of her books
Selima Hill reads a selection of short poems from eight of the collections she has published between Gloria: Selected Poems (2008) and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023): Fruitcake (2007), People Who Like Meatballs (2012), The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism (2014), Jutland (2015), The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016), Splash Like Jesus (2017), I May Be Stupid But I’m Not That Stupid (2019) and Men Who Feed Pigeons (2019). Neil Astley filmed her reading in the octagonal Garden Tower in Dorset in May 2023.
Selima Hill: Men Who Feed Pigeons
Selima Hill talks to Emily Berry about Men Who Feed Pigeons and reads a selection of poems from the book first published in The Poetry Review : 'Standing on His Doorstep', 'The Beautiful Man Whose Name I Can't Pronounce', 'A Happy-looking Man', 'Jelly', 'Bucket', 'What Kind of Woman Am I', 'Chickens', 'You Either Love a Person or You Don't', 'My Horse-hoof Soup', 'Berries' and 'The Tank'. The interview was recorded by Emily Berry for The Poetry Society podcast in 2021. This film was edited by Neil Astley and Peter Hebden and included in Bloodaxe's online book launch event shared with Hannah Lowe and Stephanie Norgate on 16 September 2021. The full podcast can be heard by clicking on the RELATED AUDIO tab below.
Selima Hill reads seven poems from Gloria
Selima Hill reads seven poems from Gloria: Selected Poems In Person: 30 Poets
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