A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus
Selima Hill
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From the publisher
The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022
Selima Hill’s twenty-second book of poetry 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, fragile 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.
'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 2022
‘… by turns surreal, witty and touching is Selima Hill's tomely A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus, which, at 270 pages, has the feel of a Collected, but in Hill's trademark refusal of convention, it is a book full of kaleidoscopic miniatures. Three poems often share one page where voices of animals, objects and shared lives intertwine: there is enormous fun in Hill's writing […] in their brevity these poems possess an oddly snowballing effect, where narratives fuse with one another. […] This book marks Hill as a poet of boundless reinvention.' – Mícheál McCann, The Irish Times