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. ‘The English Summer shimmers with exquisite revelations.’
Pascale Petit

‘Nothing disappoints in this nimble, humane, and brilliantly inventive debut.’
Sarah Howe

‘A lacerating debut.’
Clare Pollard

‘This scrupulously precision-built collection speaks from the missing centre of Englishness itself.’
Vidyan Ravinthiran

A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation