Matthew Hollis' "The Diomedes"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem comes from Matthew Hollis’ remarkable collection, Earth House, which blends explorations of the four cardinal directions and original translations of Anglo-Saxon verse from the Exeter Book.

Matthew Hollis was born in Norwich in 1971, and now lives in London. His debut Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is co-editor of Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and 101 Poems Against War (Faber & Faber, 2003), and editor of Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, 2011). Now All Roads Lead to France: the Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, UK, 2011; Norton, US, 2012) won the Costa Biography Award and the H. W. Fisher Biography Prize, was Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Biography of the Year. He has published the handmade and letterpress pamphlets Stones (Incline Press, 2016), East (Clutag Press, 2016), Leaves (Hazel Press, 2020) and Havener (Bonnefant Press, 2022). Leaves was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2021. He is the author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Faber & Faber, UK, Norton, US, 2022). He was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber from 2012 to 2023. His second book-length collection, Earth House, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023 and was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023.

-bio via Bloodaxe Books

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.0	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, June 21st, 2024.
0:08.6	Today's poem is by contemporary poet Matthew Hollis.
0:12.6	It's called The Diomedes.
0:16.4	As a quick bit of background on the subject of this poem, the Diamides are two islands in the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea near Alaska, actually between Alaska and Russia.
0:30.8	The big Diamid is also known as the Tomorrow Isle, and it belongs to Russia.
0:37.4	The Little Diamid, or the Yesterday Isle, and it belongs to Russia.
0:41.5	The Little Diomed or the Yesterday Isle belongs to the U.S., and they are just shy of two and a half miles apart from one another,
0:47.3	though they are separated by 21 hours of time
0:50.7	because the international dateline runs between them, as you'll see in the poem.
0:57.9	So we'll talk more about that in a minute, but there's some helpful background as we dip into
1:02.5	this poem, the Diomedes.
1:08.6	Summers, he would sail for Alaska, working the crabbers as deckhand or galley.
1:13.9	Autumn's returning with old weather stories of clam catchers, fur trappers, and the twin aisles of Diamid,
1:20.2	two miles and a continent between them, and how, in winter, when the straits froze over,
1:26.0	the islanders could walk from one to the other,
1:29.1	crossing the sheet for family, scrimshaw, soapstone, to marry, passing the date line
1:35.1	that ran through the channel, stepping between days as they went.
1:39.8	As far as I know, he doesn't go back.
1:42.4	If he did, he'd hear that only the fearless now track on foot,
1:46.0	the pack no longer dependable for walrus, ski plane, or the human step.
1:51.4	Even now, there's something to his story I find difficult to fathom.
	...

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