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Product Description
The first Selected from 'England's most important living poet' The Times
'Hill so entirely eclipses most of his contemporaries that it seems meaningless to rank in relation to them. Trumpets should be blown, garlands made ... loquacious, playful, wildly comic ... poignant. His greatness is as certain as that of the poets he invokes' Daily Telegraph
'Whatever the densities of Hill's expression, or the powerful impacted forces in his syntax and rhythms, this poetry achieves a strength, memorability and precision beyond the abilities of any other poet writing in English' Peter McDonald, TLS
About the Author
Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, Geoffrey Hill is the author of three books of criticism and eleven books of poetry, including The Triumph of Love, co-winner of the Heinemann Award. His Collected Poems, Canaan, The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech!, The Orchards of Syon, Scenes from Comus and Without Title are all published by Penguin. Hill currently lives and teaches in Massachusetts, where he is Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. He is also Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford; Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and since 1996 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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First Sentence
Against the burly air I strode Crying the miracles of God. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Against the burly air I strode Crying the miracles of God. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Selected Poems
I find that Mr. Hill has progressed from a highly formal, carefully structured verse form to a looser, more boldly imaginative vernacular which is highly reminiscent, to my mind, of the transition made in Robert Lowell's writing career with equivalent results. Both are major poets who have shaped the way verse can be written and daringly re-imagined themselves in mid-career.
I find that Mr. Hill has progressed from a highly formal, carefully structured verse form to a looser, more boldly imaginative vernacular which is highly reminiscent, to my mind, of the transition made in Robert Lowell's writing career with equivalent results. Both are major poets who have shaped the way verse can be written and daringly re-imagined themselves in mid-career.
10 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A huge disappointment. Starts off presciently with dazzling pieces from Hill's earliest work (For the Unfallen), then (with one or two exceptions) rapidly descends into impenetrable, autistic, verbiage which, sadly, is not intended to be illuminating. Hill is constipated with complex, tortuous ideas, which he is unable to translate into verse. But this is just as well because he does not consider his readers worthy of his thoughts. A big question mark continues to hang over Hill's credentials. His Selected Poems do not help his cause.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Poetry with a Hammer
5 Jun 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
For decades Geoffrey Hill has been called by critics the best active british poet. And they're right. What's more, barring the possible exceptions of John Ashbery and Derek Walcott, he might be the best living poet in the english language. His range of reference, philosophical weight, obvious technical accomplishment, and severe moral sensibility make Hill's work uncommonly rewarding.
Yet the very things that make his work so consistently good (and I can't think of another poet more consistent) also make his work too demanding to appeal to any but the most dedicated readers of poetry. Like Alvin Feinman (a great poet whom he otherwise doesn't much resemble), Hill demands much from his readers-- possibly too much. He is pretty much guaranteeing himself the moniker of "poet's poet" (not a label to sneeze at, of course, but not perhaps the best way to broadcast a poetics of such moral seriousness). Still, the device of a "selected poems" keeps things from becoming too overwhelming, giving us an overview of his entire career and, therefore, a chronology to help us along.
If anyone wants to read a wonderful, if demanding, contemporary poet then Geoffrey Hill is your man.
Yet the very things that make his work so consistently good (and I can't think of another poet more consistent) also make his work too demanding to appeal to any but the most dedicated readers of poetry. Like Alvin Feinman (a great poet whom he otherwise doesn't much resemble), Hill demands much from his readers-- possibly too much. He is pretty much guaranteeing himself the moniker of "poet's poet" (not a label to sneeze at, of course, but not perhaps the best way to broadcast a poetics of such moral seriousness). Still, the device of a "selected poems" keeps things from becoming too overwhelming, giving us an overview of his entire career and, therefore, a chronology to help us along.
If anyone wants to read a wonderful, if demanding, contemporary poet then Geoffrey Hill is your man.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
More Menace than Atonement
19 Sep 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The peculiar thing about Hill's career is that he wrote five books of poetry from 1950 to 1995, and has written six or seven more since 1995. The Selected is a good introduction to Hill's occasionally sloppy and prosaic later work: the poems included are a lot better than those left out; it turns out that there were, after all, some good poems in Hill's atrocious volume "Speech! Speech!" The Selected is a much more painless introduction to later Hill than the original volumes: with earlier Hill, the situation is somewhat different. A lot of good poems from "King Log" and "Tenebrae" -- poems with passages like this --
The pigeon purrs in the wood; the wood has gone;
dark leaves that flick to silver in the gust,
and the marsh-orchids and the heron's nest,
goldgrimy shafts and pillars of the sun.
...
`O clap your hands' so that the dove takes flight,
bursts through the leaves with an untidy sound,
plunges its wings into the green twilight
above this long-sought and forsaken ground,
the half-built ruins of the new estate,
warheads of mushrooms round the filter-pond.
("Idylls of the King")
have had to be left out, mostly, no doubt, because of a lack of space. This was unfortunate and somewhat avoidable as including the first five books entire would have added fewer than 100 pages to this book.
Hill's combination of lyricism, nostalgia, obscurity, religion, violence (he wrote a famous essay called "Poetry as menace and atonement"), and grumpiness is probably not everybody's cup of tea, but most people interested in poetry _as language_ will find something to enjoy in his work. William Logan remarked that Hill has his finger on the pulse of English more than any other living poet; I'd go further, and say that no 20th century poet has used the language with such consistent authority and richness:
Distant flocks gaze into limestone's half-light.
The full moon, now, rears with unhastening speed,
sketches the black ridge-end, sheds thin lustre
downward aslant its gouged and watered scree.
("Orchards of Syon")
or this, from the last poem in the book:
the humming bird that is not
of these climes; and the great
wanderers like the albatross;
the ocean, ranging-in, laying itself
down on our alien shore.
("Broken Hierarchies")
This much-delayed American edition of Hill's Selected Poems -- it came out in Britain in 2007 or so -- doesn't include the poems in his latest book, _A Treatise of Civil Power_, which came out after the British _Selected_; a few of the poems in _Treatise_ -- "Masques," "The Peacock at Alderton," "Before Senility," "Citations I" -- will eventually be part of the Hill canon. That said, however, there is very little in this book that isn't worth reading, and it will hopefully get Hill at least some new admirers.
The pigeon purrs in the wood; the wood has gone;
dark leaves that flick to silver in the gust,
and the marsh-orchids and the heron's nest,
goldgrimy shafts and pillars of the sun.
...
`O clap your hands' so that the dove takes flight,
bursts through the leaves with an untidy sound,
plunges its wings into the green twilight
above this long-sought and forsaken ground,
the half-built ruins of the new estate,
warheads of mushrooms round the filter-pond.
("Idylls of the King")
have had to be left out, mostly, no doubt, because of a lack of space. This was unfortunate and somewhat avoidable as including the first five books entire would have added fewer than 100 pages to this book.
Hill's combination of lyricism, nostalgia, obscurity, religion, violence (he wrote a famous essay called "Poetry as menace and atonement"), and grumpiness is probably not everybody's cup of tea, but most people interested in poetry _as language_ will find something to enjoy in his work. William Logan remarked that Hill has his finger on the pulse of English more than any other living poet; I'd go further, and say that no 20th century poet has used the language with such consistent authority and richness:
Distant flocks gaze into limestone's half-light.
The full moon, now, rears with unhastening speed,
sketches the black ridge-end, sheds thin lustre
downward aslant its gouged and watered scree.
("Orchards of Syon")
or this, from the last poem in the book:
the humming bird that is not
of these climes; and the great
wanderers like the albatross;
the ocean, ranging-in, laying itself
down on our alien shore.
("Broken Hierarchies")
This much-delayed American edition of Hill's Selected Poems -- it came out in Britain in 2007 or so -- doesn't include the poems in his latest book, _A Treatise of Civil Power_, which came out after the British _Selected_; a few of the poems in _Treatise_ -- "Masques," "The Peacock at Alderton," "Before Senility," "Citations I" -- will eventually be part of the Hill canon. That said, however, there is very little in this book that isn't worth reading, and it will hopefully get Hill at least some new admirers.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Great stuff
22 April 2011
Format:Paperback
For those who haven't taken the plunge, this makes an excellent introduction to an exemplary body of poetry in our time. Whatever might be your taste or creed, it's phrase- and image-making that make a poet. As poetry, there's nothing in English today to rival what Hill has accomplished. It's a difficult style that requires tremendous effort, and has distinguished Hill from the first, all through the efflorescence of his later volumes. The Triumph of Love and Speech! Speech! show what a gift Hill has for capturing voices. I find The Orchard of Syon deeply moving, much less angry. The earlier poems are indispensible as well. I have a particular love for The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz - a heartbreaking sequence of love poems that someone, I can't remember who, has called Hill's happiest achievement. Mercian Hymn is simply astounding.
Just one comment on Hill's much-commented on difficulty. Hill himself has said it best, when he remarked (in the Paris Review) that people seem to demand accessibility in poetry, but not in other forms of art. We experience real difficulty everyday in life, so why should poetry be easy? Its allusions can be obscure, but more often public and, if one were ignorant, leading to amazing discoveries. In this day of Google and Wikipedia, it's hard to call such things difficult.
What might be lastingly difficult is Hill's moral stance. I for one find it hard to care about some of his themes - but it doesn't matter, does it? Hill is more contemporary than many experimental poets; and as a practiced rhetorician, he's never less than engaging. Anyway, just wanted to join the chorus of praise...
Just one comment on Hill's much-commented on difficulty. Hill himself has said it best, when he remarked (in the Paris Review) that people seem to demand accessibility in poetry, but not in other forms of art. We experience real difficulty everyday in life, so why should poetry be easy? Its allusions can be obscure, but more often public and, if one were ignorant, leading to amazing discoveries. In this day of Google and Wikipedia, it's hard to call such things difficult.
What might be lastingly difficult is Hill's moral stance. I for one find it hard to care about some of his themes - but it doesn't matter, does it? Hill is more contemporary than many experimental poets; and as a practiced rhetorician, he's never less than engaging. Anyway, just wanted to join the chorus of praise...
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