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.

Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters on farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 40 years. Her collection Violet (1997) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UK's major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe Books include People Who Like Meatballs (2012), shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award; Jutland (2015), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation which was shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize and was earlier shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize; The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016), shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017; and Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022; and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Selima Hill was awarded The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022, made on the basis of her body of work, with special recognition for her 2008 Bloodaxe Books retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems.