Canaan [Paperback]

The poem asks whether the "witness" of those who stood not only against Hitler but against the politics of Hitlerism ("wild reasons of the state", as Hill's poem on Bonhoeffer has it) is safe in Europe's keeping, when its tributes to the murdered conspirators "compound with Cicero's maxims, Schiller's chant" (Beethoven's Ode to Joy, presumably) the silencing of von Haeften's "silenced verities". More ominously, it speaks of the "new depths of invention" to which the Nazis sank in the torture and execution of members of the Kreisau circle, suggesting that the bestiality of the SS is another part of the disavowed inheritence of modern Europe. The interrogators played records of children singing folk music to drown out the screams of their captives; does not our culture also have recourse to "children's / songs to mask torture" (cf Benigni's _La Vita e' Bella_)?

Not all of _Canaan_ is as good as this. Hill's "Psalms of Assize", for instance, read like marginalia on marginalia, simultaneously clenched and lyrical: the "singable remainder" of a calcinated theology, perhaps, but too brittle to last in the reader's imagination. But much of the volume is more than worth sticking with. The poems are more often than not about the disappearance of their own referents - "the names / and what they have about them dark to dark" ("Sobieski's Shield") - but this is the very opposite of a willed obscurity: Hill's language calls after lost things into the darkness into which they have fallen, and sometimes manages to recover "lost footage, / achieve too late prescient telegraphy" (another name for 20/20 hindsight?). Perhaps this marks Hill ineradicably as a grumpy old modernist: whilst other poets, other poetics, have devoted themselves to exploring and even celebrating the contingency of language and meaning, _Canaan_ remains anachronistically committed to an elegiac mode. But in fact its particular glory is that it shows what the elegy can be and go on being even amid a society and culture besotted with the evanescent and continually on the make, yet afflicted with a deep and inscrutable nostalgia for a loss it has little way of knowing how to confront.

Mr. Hill's themes and methods are signaled early on, in the title of the collection and in the epigraph :

...So ye children of Israel did wickedly in the
sight of the Lord, & forgate the Lord their God,
& serued Baalim, and Asheroth ... Yea, they
offred their sonnes, and their daughters vnto
diuels, And shed innocent blood, euen the blood
of their soones, and of their daughters, whome
they offred vnto the idols of Canaan, and the
land they defiled with blood. Thus were they
steined with their owne inuentions ... o
Canaan, the land of the Philistims, I wil euen
destroy thee without an inhabitant.

Judges 3:7; Psalm 106: 37-9; Zephaniah 2:5
(from the Geneva Bible of 1560)

The Geneva Bible of 1560? Okay, so he's delving back into the past, to a vibrant and impassioned form of ruggedly fundamentalist
Protestantism and a Bible written by Brits in exile (note that Professor Hill himself is and has been at Boston University); comparing modern
England to ancient Canaan, and casting himself in the role of doomsayer. The reader has been warned.

Here's an example of one of the more accessible pieces :

DARK-LAND

Wherein Wesley stood
up from his father's grave,
summoned familiar dust
for strange salvation:

whereto England rous'd,
ignorant, her inane
Midas-like hunger: smoke
engrossed, cloud-encumbered,

a spectral people
raking among the ash;
its freedom a lost haul
of entailed riches.

I've no idea who Wesley and his father are, though I assume it's John Wesley (1703-91), the founder of Methodism, but can tell you that this
bleak vision taps into three of Mr. Hill's favorite themes : of England as having become excessively materialistic, even hedonistic; of
hard-won British liberty as a thing of the past; and of post-War Europe as an ash heap. That much I think I follow.

Or consider just two of the images from a poem, most of which I didn't understand, DE JURE BELLI AC PACIS, which is written in memory
of Hans-Bernd von Haeften, who plotted against murder and was executed in 1944. The first :

Could none predict these haughty degradations
as now your high-strung
martyred resistance serves
to consecrate the liberties of Maastricht.

followed later by :

To the high-minded
base-metal forgers of this common Europe,
community of parody, you stand ec-
centric as a prophet.

Even without being able to follow every elusive allusion in the poem, and without knowing anything of von Haeften, you can easily discern
the message that Mr. Hill is contemptuous of the new European Union, based solely on economic integration, with no thought given to the
unlikelihood of ever turning these disparate nations into a genuine community, and little regard given to the surrender of sovereignty and
freedom it will require.

Even if you are unmoved by the specter of England subjugating itself to French and German bureaucrats and indifferent to the economism of
modern British society, you may have trouble figuring out why Geoffrey Hill sounds so angry, so much at times like an Old Testament
prophet. But think on this quote from Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor :

It does seem in our countries in Britain today, especially in England and Wales, that Christianity, as a sort of backdrop to people's lives
and moral decisions - and to the Government, the social life of the country - has now almost been vanquished.

or this one from Dr. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury :

A tacit atheism prevails. Death is assumed to be the end of life, bleak though that thought is. If we need hope to clutch to our breast at all
it will be in such greatly scaled down forms, such as our longings for family happiness, the next holiday or personal fulfilment. Our
concentration on the here and now renders thoughts of eternity irrelevant.

All of which brings us back to the Biblical Canaan, where the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and so were sold into slavery. Simply
as a literary matter, Geoffrey Hill's poems here are a powerful evocation of the idea that something similar is happening now to England and
the British people, that they have become a post-Christian and demoralized society. And if, like me, you agree with the specific charges he
levels here, however oblique the terms in which he couches them, then you'll like the book very much and be honored to put some effort into
reading it and wrestling with his meanings.

GRADE : A-