The English Summer

Holly Hopkins

• Publisher: Penned in the Margins
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781908058942
• eBook ISBN:
  9781913850128
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

*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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Holly Hopkins
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Country Churches
• The English Summer
• Drought
• The Death of a Fridge
• A Stone Wall Around The Duke of Northumberland’s Park
• Scuts
• Telephone Girls
• The Flayings
• After the Workshops I’m Shown Round by a Member of Staff
• Green Man in Spring
• Lady Godiva
• Zombies
• Tidal Islands
• The City Cut from a Mountain
• The Garden Cemetery Trust
• Rows of Differently Coloured Houses
• Stratigraphy
• Duck
• Starlings
• Early Winter
• Watching a North American Loon from St Thomas’ Hospital
• Hiding from a Mouse
• Offchurch
• I Have Chosen to Become a Plasterer
• Explanation for Those Who Don’t Know Love
• Stay Home
• On Follies
• How to Balance Law Books on Your Head
• Three King Canutes
• The Alibi
• When I found some women with bellies
• Hilda and Cædmon
• Antonio, Duke of Milan
• Inheritance
• The Moon
• The Castle
• The King’s Manor Cat
• England, Where Did You Go?
• Notes
• Acknowledgements