Selima Hill lives in Lyme Regis, Dorset and is the only poet to have been shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward and TS Eliot Prizes--with her seventh collection, Violet. She lives by the sea in Dorset with her ducks, grandchildren and other animals. Bunny, as she herself says, is not "the jolly happy book I was looking forward to writing...". Set in the "haunted house of adolescence", Bunny takes us on a journey through a strange house, peopled by a girl, various aunts, a remote father and a sinister lodger. As Time Out put it "she evokes...the inner childhood world we're supposed to give up as we become adult yet which artists need to draw upon". Selima is currently working on her 2002 Collection, Portrait of My Ex-Husband as a Lily, as well as tutoring at the South Bank Centre and at the Poetry School in London.

What the Whitbread judges said: "A unique voice in British poetry, Selima Hill has taken on a near-impossible subject and from it produces a work that is at once quirky, terrifying and ultimately uplifting."

A collection of blackly comic poems set in the haunted house of adolescence. Bunny tells the intimate story of a young girl, growing up in London during the 50's in an atmosphere of madness and menace, shame and blame.

2004-09-30 Good writing but fragmentary

I found these poems very difficult to get into, partly because I felt they were so fragmentary. The idea is very good, but I don't feel it's been fully realised in this work. In some poems, it was almost as if the shortness itself was acting as a barrier to the reader.

However, the images and their juxtaposition are certainly interesting (thus the 3 star rating), and I would try this author again. I don't think I'd recommend this particular book though.