Selima Hill

Selima Hill’s most recent collection is The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence.

Poem: ‘Below Hekla’

Selima Hill, 10 January 1983

I appear like a bird from nowhere. I have a new name. I am as clean as a whistle. I beat the buttermilk in big while bowls until it is smooth. I wash the pearly plates under the tap, and fifty canvas bumpers and fifty socks. They drip in the sun below grey mountains like the moon’s.

Each night I lift the children in their sleep and hold out the china pot for them: ‘Wilt thu pissa,...

Poem: ‘A Voice in the Garden’

Selima Hill, 2 September 1982

‘Your uncle’s here!’ my mother called, ‘Are you ready?’ The taxi was waiting to take us to our weekly swimming lessons. I drove through Marylebone like a VIP, my immaculate uncle close beside me, smelling of soap and peppermint ... He crouched on the edge of the pool and shouted ‘One, two!One, two!’as I struggled with the water like a kitten. I kept...

Poem: ‘Charlotte’

Selima Hill, 4 March 1982

She comes into the garden to take the washing in. She raises her arms

to her husband’s shirts like a worshipper, and then she makes a lovely pile of them.

Wings, sails, copes, you are folded and ready to be ironed ...

And now she stands, becalmed, with the cold washing cradled in her arms.

Poem: ‘Private View’

Selima Hill, 20 August 1981

I am the wife of the man who won first prize. I am not wearing my new shoes which, though smarter, are not as comfortable as these. I must stand well. ‘He’s a very sensitive guy. I’d really like to meet him.’ ‘Yes, he’s obviously been through a lot ...’

Because the paint is spread so thick the paintings look like toast. Shoals of visitors move in and...

Silent as a Fire Alarm: Selima Hill

Emily Berry, 6 October 2022

Children often interpret symbolic language literally, which might seem counter to the work of a poet, who is usually in the business of making metaphors, not dismantling them. But the child’s perspective...

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Neil Corcoran confronts the new recklessness

Neil Corcoran, 28 September 1989

For a writer who several years ago published a ‘Manifesto Against Manifestoes’, James Fenton has published his fair share of manifestoes, including a disguised one for a...

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Travellers

John Kerrigan, 13 October 1988

August is the cruellest month, breeding tailbacks on the Dover Road and logjams in every departure lounge. Travel reverts to travail, stirring dull roots in trepalium – that classical...

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Tropical Storms

Blake Morrison, 6 September 1984

Johnson’s Imlac, urging that the poet neglect the ‘minuter discriminations’ of the tulip leaf in favour of ‘general properties’, has been unpopular for two hundred...

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