The Orchards of Syon [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Geoffrey Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2002

In the words of the magazine Poetry Review, a kind of late fury has gripped Geoffrey Hill in recent years after a decade's silence, with CANAAN (1996), THE LOVE TRIUMPH (1998), SPEECH! SPEECH! (2001) - all published in Penguin - and now this new volume. All these books are driven by a profound quarrel with the modern world. This new book consists of 72 numbered poems, each of 24 lines. Together they make up a kind of Dantean eclogue in which the landscape of Hill's youth - rural Worcestershire - offers a glimpse of paradise in the midst of the modern world. This is a major poet writing serious, beautiful poetry.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wildly allusive, painfully self-aware and on occasion radiant, this long and winding poem in 72 blank-verse sections completes a trilogy of personal long poems from the frighteningly learned English poet, long in residence in Boston. Having admired Hill's meticulous lyric for three decades, poets and critics on both sides of the Atlantic were startled by 1998's forthright The Triumph of Love, a book-length poem about history, memory, violence, Christianity, contemporary Britain and Hill's own career (he teaches at Boston University). That book and its successor, Speech! Speech! (2000), showed a poet with great gifts, but one so absorbed by his topical complaints and idiosyncratic learning that his work seemed brilliant but overambitious, and perhaps too much to navigate. Hill's new volume retains its predecessors' range of reference (Bach, Coleridge, minor prophets, Methodist hymns, Leopardi, Heine, Frank O'Hara, D.H. Lawrence, Ingmar Bergman and more). Where Speech! tended wryly toward rant, the new books shows its aging poet-hero finding, if fitfully, happiness, pastoral space and consolation, as the title, and the recurrent mention of Hopkins's "Goldengrove," imply. Some segments suggest a tour of rural and suburban England ("the breadth of this/ autumnal land"); others celebrate earlier artists' "resounding mastery of things hard laboured" or mourn "through a high formal keening." Finally, Hill contemplates his advancing years, and his poetic projects, with a remarkable music and a rueful look at his own ambitions: "I can see only so far; I can say/ only so much." (Mar.) Forecast: Hill published an average of a book a decade before Triumph, and moved from Houghton Mifflin to Counterpoint for Speech!. This better and easier fourth book in six years (counting 1997's Cannan) should provoke a few major assessments of Hill's career.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is the fourth and final installment in a series containing, most recently, Speech! Speech!, by Oxford-educated Hill, a prolific poet and professor of religion at Boston University. It is a wordplay cycle of 72 "image-conscious" stanzas in which each 24-line stanza depicts a journey through "threads of chaos." Although some dramatic personal stanzas have high impact, underneath the dazzling surface of this ascetic, anti-narrative poetry the path to "the Orchards of Syon" leads back to the familiar ground of Christian humanism. Like musical motifs in a somber self-dialog, allusions to Dante, Hopkins, and P‚guy provide high-minded trail blazes to lead fallen humanity to "that dream which is called vision." Marvelous embellished imagery acts like a badge of martyrdom for the loss of divine presence in a world of "chain-story tawdry profiles." Pursuing elusive associations of "orchard," Hill argues that we lose contact with the signals of Western thought at our own peril. Despite "a radical otherness," Hill's poetry undertakes a difficult struggle "to make the last connection" with "time's continuities tearing us apart." For larger collections, especially those holding the previous works in this series. Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• ISBN-10: 1582431663
• ASIN: B000ENBQ10
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,373,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Latest installment from the maestro of contemporary verse, March 25, 2003

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The Light Fantastic - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Orchards of Syon (Hardcover)

A meditation on immortality, memory, and poetry: all this should be familiar to readers of Geoffrey Hill's poetry. Orchards is the third book-long poem Hill has produced in the past five years, and, even more so than the first two, must be read in conjunction with his earlier work to be fully appreciated and understood. (First time readers of Hill would be better advised to turn to his "New and Collected Poems," or "The Triumph of Love" for a starting point).

Once again (the other time was in "Speech! Speech!") Hill forgoes the sweeping lyricism of "The Triumph of Love" in favor of a focus on pitch rather than tone (think of Hopkins). At times, awkward, flailing about, reaching and overreaching, or falling short, "The Orchards of Syon" nevertheless achieves at moments a poignancy and precision that rewards close (very close) readings.

Hill was born in 1932 in England, but now teaches at Boston University; his topics are 16th/17th c. English poetry, but also Hopkins and 20th century poetry, and he is "Professor of Religion and Literature". Unsurprisingly then, this poem delves into the question of Augustine vs Pelagius; Bradwardine vs Ockham, that is to say, divine will vs human "free" will.

Beware, this is dense stuff, and will require time and effort to be unpacked, unravelled, understood. It is a poem to be read over years, not days or months. As Hill writes in section VIII:

The curlew's pitch distracts us from her nest.
But: end this for all in some shape other
than vexed bafflement; each triangular
wall-cope cladded with tight moss
springy as a terrier's pelt, buttonhole
emerald polypodae, sprung tremblers
within the burring air of the fell?

Amen to that, I say.