A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus by Selima Hill
Bloodaxe Books
Published 23rd October 2025.
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...' - Philip Terry, The Guardian (The best recent poetry) on Women in Comfortable Shoes
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...' - Philip Terry, The Guardian (The best recent poetry) on Women in Comfortable Shoes
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