The English Summer is the first full collection by Manchester-based poet Holly Hopkins and is scheduled for release in June 2022.
Hopkins’ long-awaited debut confronts the illusions and paradoxes of English history in poems that range from medieval anchorites and 18th-century follies to 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 a ‘pie-faced’ St George is upstaged by the horse.
Director of Penned in the Margins Tom Chivers says, ‘Holly’s poems are clever, witty and exacting creations that probe our collective myths and mores. I was gripped from the first page.’
Hopkins lives in Manchester and is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. Poetry London described her 2014 pamphlet Soon Every House Will Have One as ‘ferociously impressive’. Having trained as an archaeologist, her explorations of people and places – of landscapes real and projected, historical and imagined – are both thrilling and timely.
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