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Product Description
Review
Praise for Geoffrey Hill:
'Hill so entirely eclipses most of his contemporaries that it seems meaningless to rank him in relation to them. Trumpets should be blown, garlands made . . . his greatness is as certain as the poets he invokes' Daily Telegraph
'Hill is often and rightly said to be the greatest living English poet . . . [He] can write lines with a deep gravelly ring to them which could only come from powerful thinking about the English language and its inner energies. He can describe England with a warm depth that no other living poet can match . . . brilliant writing' Guardian
Product Description
Geoffrey Hill's latest book takes its title from an obscure pamphlet of Milton's, a poet in whose footsteps Hill can justly claim to follow. Again we confront his usual obsessions — language, governance, war, politics, the contemporary and classical worlds and the nature of poetry itself. This is without a doubt the work of a major poet, writing at the height of his powers.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's very hard to write a review that does justice to the intellectual content of Geoffrey Hill's recent work. He is, without doubt, one of the singular poetic voices of his generation. However, reading the poetry, and being complicit as a modern inhabitant of Hill's vision of England places the reader in a location that is neither comfortable nor secure. As he points out in the poem `On Reading Milton and the English Revolution', `England / can do without most of us'.
This is unusual because Hill's work, while being powerfully rooted in theology and history, and in the tonal music of sixteenth and seventeenth century English, is also securely provincial English in its location. Hill's poetry, especially in the 1970 `Mercian Hymns' is a voice for a version of the West Midlands, a borderland caught between ancient landscapes and the wild forces of modern industrialism, haunted in this volume and elsewhere by the long shadow of dark age kingdoms, and the cultural and trading energy of Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.
Hill's sensibility is also haunted by the two world wars; his is a Worcestershire whose woods and copses evoke the shattered trees of Passchendaele and the Somme. His recent volumes share with Tom Paulin's `The Invasion Handbook' the poetic power of World War 2 in the modern mind. In this collection, the war is connoted by references to Alanbrookes' diary, Werner von Braun and Willy Brandt's penance at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in 1970.
The dominant figure of the collection is Milton, who, on his 400th anniversary, permeates the collection from its title (taken from one of his pamphlets) to the political and spiritual imperatives it embodies. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Miltonic (and Blakean) theme is the intertextuality of reading his namesake Christopher Hill's `Milton and the English Revolution' along with Edmund Burke and Michael Horowitz' `Children of Albion'. Hill also makes the most powerful poetic engagement with the figure of Cromwell in poetry since Brendan Kennelly in 1987, not being above playful references to the portrayal of Cromwell by Richard Harris in the 1970 film. Characteristically, these are juxtaposed with Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II, which seems ironically dangled as an example of modern England's political complacency and crushing anti-intellectualism.
It is hard to comment on the immense subtleties of style, but the poems dedicated to Handel and Brahms suggest an echo of James Joyce's balance between images, connotations and closely observed musicality. The high intellectualism of the poetry is a counterpoint to the rugged dialect of provincial English, most memorably in this collection snatches of the Bible in the neo-Anglo-Saxon dialect of the Black Country.
In all, the collection is something of a psychogeography of English radicalism, acknowledging the tangled landscape of poetry in English which includes the presence of Whitman, Housman and Hopkins. Hill continues his anatomy of modern England in the role of a besieged defender of the European intellectual tradition. Like Stanley Spencer, who is a slight but significant presence in the collection, Hill is renewing its vigour with a graceful juxtaposition of the localised and the universal.
This is unusual because Hill's work, while being powerfully rooted in theology and history, and in the tonal music of sixteenth and seventeenth century English, is also securely provincial English in its location. Hill's poetry, especially in the 1970 `Mercian Hymns' is a voice for a version of the West Midlands, a borderland caught between ancient landscapes and the wild forces of modern industrialism, haunted in this volume and elsewhere by the long shadow of dark age kingdoms, and the cultural and trading energy of Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.
Hill's sensibility is also haunted by the two world wars; his is a Worcestershire whose woods and copses evoke the shattered trees of Passchendaele and the Somme. His recent volumes share with Tom Paulin's `The Invasion Handbook' the poetic power of World War 2 in the modern mind. In this collection, the war is connoted by references to Alanbrookes' diary, Werner von Braun and Willy Brandt's penance at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in 1970.
The dominant figure of the collection is Milton, who, on his 400th anniversary, permeates the collection from its title (taken from one of his pamphlets) to the political and spiritual imperatives it embodies. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Miltonic (and Blakean) theme is the intertextuality of reading his namesake Christopher Hill's `Milton and the English Revolution' along with Edmund Burke and Michael Horowitz' `Children of Albion'. Hill also makes the most powerful poetic engagement with the figure of Cromwell in poetry since Brendan Kennelly in 1987, not being above playful references to the portrayal of Cromwell by Richard Harris in the 1970 film. Characteristically, these are juxtaposed with Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II, which seems ironically dangled as an example of modern England's political complacency and crushing anti-intellectualism.
It is hard to comment on the immense subtleties of style, but the poems dedicated to Handel and Brahms suggest an echo of James Joyce's balance between images, connotations and closely observed musicality. The high intellectualism of the poetry is a counterpoint to the rugged dialect of provincial English, most memorably in this collection snatches of the Bible in the neo-Anglo-Saxon dialect of the Black Country.
In all, the collection is something of a psychogeography of English radicalism, acknowledging the tangled landscape of poetry in English which includes the presence of Whitman, Housman and Hopkins. Hill continues his anatomy of modern England in the role of a besieged defender of the European intellectual tradition. Like Stanley Spencer, who is a slight but significant presence in the collection, Hill is renewing its vigour with a graceful juxtaposition of the localised and the universal.
Format:Paperback
I have found this work more accessible than the Day Books published so far in that he explores ideas in a more discursive manner that gives thought, lyricism and discourse a strong and balanced role here. The poems work more in the manner of the moderns like Yeats and Eliot without the contorted twisting of syntax and line that comes after in Clavics and other published excerpts from the new work I've seen. I enjoyed the meditative, resonant quality of the concepts and imagery presented here.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Gotta love the title
12 Jun 2008
Format:Paperback
Geoffrey Hill's characteristic attitude towards things, a sort of disarming grumpiness, is less evident in this volume than in the previous few. The book is still somewhat daunting, and much of it is both obscure (e.g. the reader is invited to overhear Hill talking to himself about Burke) and rhythmically inert. But there are several good poems. My favorites are the poems about Wyatt, and the beautiful one about Ben Jonson's "Masques" (note: if you don't recognize these names, you probably shouldn't waste your time on this book) --
"I see Inigo Jones's great arches
in my mind's eye, his water-inky clouds,
the paraphernalia of a royal masque;
dung and detritus in the crazy streets,
the big coaches bellying in their skirts
pothole to pothole, and the men of fire,
the link-boys slouching and the rainy wind."
Another poem I like is "Coda," which begins like this --
"Shredded--my kite--in the myriad-snagged
crabapple crown, the cane cross-piece flailing;
a dark wind visible even deep in the hedge.
I knew then how much my eros
was emptiness, thorn-fixed on desolation,"
And then there's this memorable and much-quoted bit from the "title poem" ("A Precis, or Memorandum, of C.P.") --
"The watered gold that February drains
out of the overcast...
the snowdrop fettled on its hinge, waxwings
becoming sportif in the grimy air."
I could go on excerpting the good bits -- which are not entirely unrepresentative; if you're patient and reasonably interested in English history, this book is worth your time. If not, Hill has written books that are _primarily_ about other things, which you might prefer ("The Triumph of Love" about WW2, "Mercian Hymns" about the Anglo-Saxons, "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy" about Charles Peguy, etc.).
Also, Hill's early poems -- up through "Tenebrae" (1978) -- are significantly more inviting than his later ones. If you haven't read those, you should, especially "Mercian Hymns."
"I see Inigo Jones's great arches
in my mind's eye, his water-inky clouds,
the paraphernalia of a royal masque;
dung and detritus in the crazy streets,
the big coaches bellying in their skirts
pothole to pothole, and the men of fire,
the link-boys slouching and the rainy wind."
Another poem I like is "Coda," which begins like this --
"Shredded--my kite--in the myriad-snagged
crabapple crown, the cane cross-piece flailing;
a dark wind visible even deep in the hedge.
I knew then how much my eros
was emptiness, thorn-fixed on desolation,"
And then there's this memorable and much-quoted bit from the "title poem" ("A Precis, or Memorandum, of C.P.") --
"The watered gold that February drains
out of the overcast...
the snowdrop fettled on its hinge, waxwings
becoming sportif in the grimy air."
I could go on excerpting the good bits -- which are not entirely unrepresentative; if you're patient and reasonably interested in English history, this book is worth your time. If not, Hill has written books that are _primarily_ about other things, which you might prefer ("The Triumph of Love" about WW2, "Mercian Hymns" about the Anglo-Saxons, "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy" about Charles Peguy, etc.).
Also, Hill's early poems -- up through "Tenebrae" (1978) -- are significantly more inviting than his later ones. If you haven't read those, you should, especially "Mercian Hymns."
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