A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus

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...

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.

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!

Selima Hill .

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