Customer Reviews

Selected Poems

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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.

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.

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...

The other reviewers of this compilation of poems note that the author is not accessible. He is a "poet's poet" and "not for everyone".

By this I would guess that they mean hard to read. These poems are written for the select, which could be other poets, possessors of a Master's of Fine Arts, those willing to work hard at what they read, lovers of the English word in its most abstruse and yes, often beautiful.

The reward for hard work is here, in this compilation. All of the poems build, most reward a second or third reading. Few invite, and the book is easy for a lay reader to put down. I am a lay reader of poetry, and prefer Seamus Heaney. I admit to putting the book down a lot. Picking it up only occasionally.

The title, "Selected Poems" argues that someone wanted to open up this poet's work to a larger audience. I am not sure that the author wants to open his work very far. I would say that the poems can be rewarding, but also that they are not intended to be accessible, and are often therefore not enjoyable to a sideways glance sort of reader.

British poet Geoffrey Hill is one of the best poets alive, and certainly the one who takes Christianity the most seriously--he is positively tormented by the possibility of injustice, and his mastery of the English language is only one of his tools to express his righteous (not self righteous) rage. An unapologetically religious poet, he is the living prosodic contradiction to the ruse of postmodernism.

This book includes work from eleven Hill titles; two in their entirety--("Mercian Hymns" and "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy"). While it is true that one needs a bit more than a working knowledge of craft, prosody, and even some words that aren't in most dictionaries ("claustral","atrorubent"). He is heavy handed without being pretentious, a moralist without being pompous; the hostility to his work is amongst critics is due to one of two things; he will not cease to be himself, and never once steps back from the "bard" role as poet.

The series of poems that really delivers for me, in this collection, are his extended elegies to the German resisters of the Third Reich. The compact, sparse, and uncompromising beauty of these pieces are unrivalled in my mind by anything I have read in the past couple of years. Dedicated to Claus Von Stauffenberg's adjutant Hans Bernard Haeften (9 October 1908 - 21 July 1944) and Carl Friedrich Goerdeler (31 July 1884 - 2 February 1945) who were executed quite horribly for their part in the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler. Who today can equal these lines? "Those three eternal days Christus did not lie shackled in death: but found out your stark reich/deep-buried hypocausts dense for the harrowing/held there-since time so holds within itself/slow precise Fellgiebel/chivalrous Hofacker/clamped in their silence: keeps also Goerdeler's doubled, many-times-consummated, agony: in whatever fortress/on whatever foundation/then, now in eternum, the spirit bears witness through its broken flesh.." pg 154).

His "Mercian Hymns" remind me of Blake. Bottom line; for anyone who is sick of the chronic hipness and irrelevance which permeates the majority of contemporary poetry, this guy is a must. Up there with Yeats, Lorca, all the greats. Absolutely recommended to any lover of poetry.