The Triumph of Love [Paperback]

Geoffrey Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 2000

In Geoffrey Hill's words, "The poet's job is to define and yet again define. If the poet doesn't make certain horrors appear horrible, who will?" This astonishing book is a protest against evil and a tribute to those who have had the courage to resist it.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Triumph of Love is a swan song for our most violent and turbulent of centuries. Geoffrey Hill has a reputation as a difficult poet, and it's true that this volume is no easy read, but it's by no means inaccessible, either. Forming a book-length poem divided into 150 sections, its free verse is rich with allusions from Petrarch to the Scott expedition and dense with the weight of history and philosophy. Hill takes nothing less than suffering as his subject, and his poems aren't shy about staring evil straight in the face--in particular, the Holocaust, an evil compounded by our inability to distinguish one of its victims from the next: "this, and this, / the unique face, indistinguishable, this, these, choked in a cess-pit of leaking Sheol." If the subject matter is uniformly somber, the style is not. Fragmented, colloquial, often interrupted by editorial asides, parodies, and snatches of song, The Triumph of Love marks something of a departure from the stately formalism of Hill's earlier books. Through it all runs the self-interrogating, self-mocking voice of the poet, questioning his right to write about such matters as well as the language he uses to do so. In the end, however, Hill finds that the elegy itself is the only answer to the questions history poses. "What / Ought a poem to be?" he asks himself, and answers (three times), "a sad and angry consolation." Widely recognized as one of Britain's distinguished poets, here Hill has produced a memorably sad and angry consolation for "a nation / with so many memorials but no memory." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Unexpectedly soon after last year's searing Canaan comes Hill's latest indictment of Western Culture, once again obsessively examining the pockmarked, exhausted corpse of "Europa." A single poem of 150 stanzas, The Triumph of Love uncharacteristically reads as if it had been written in non-stop, Kerouac-style sessions, though Hill's signature densely wrought, freighted lines remain. Here, Hill's preoccupations are Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, the apocalyptic fire-bombings of cities in Britain and Germany and the shoah, invoked by reference to The Book of Daniel, the work of Callot and intimations of its horrors that seemingly came to the poet in boyhood. In grappling with the question of redemption for the murdered, Hill finds himself questioning?in "livid" self-examinations addressing a career's worth of criticism?the didactic mode he has previously used to such great effect. With the same granite-cut allusions and morally outraged rants that have incurred charges of turgid iconoclasm, Hill defiantly clings to his chosen mode ("I offer to the presiding judge of our art, self-pleasured Ironia"), even as he sputters in not-quite-mock self-justification. Summoning poetic heroes from Milton to Eugenio Montale, Hill finally tries out the possibilities of praise ("Lauda? Lauda? Lauda Sion? LAUDA!") only to turn and undercut them: "Incantation of incontinence?the lyric cry?/ Believe me, he's not/ told you the half of it. (All who are able may stand.)" Despite the tongue-in-cheek invitation, the reader who has followed Hill's heroic efforts to answer to history may be tempted to stand in admiration anyway.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1st Mariner Books Ed edition (January 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618001832
• ISBN-13: 978-0618001835
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #284,004 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A triumph indeed, May 31, 2001

By 

Nessander - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Triumph of Love (Paperback)

An incredible poem by a passionate and erudite poet. Written in 150 sections over 82 pages, the Triumph of Love is a poem about memory; the memory of those who have gone before us, have suffered, have made sacrifices, and the ways in which violence is done to them through the forgetting of those living today. The reader will certainly want a dictionary and encyclopedia nearby for the numerous references to historical and literary figures and the many obscure (but irreplaceable) words!

I read it through once myself, and then went back again slowly, then again looking up all the references. Each time I found new appreciation and love for this poem. It is at times beautifully lyrical, coarse, bitingly satirical, but overwhelmingly, in Hill's own words, "a sad and angry consolation". If you are familiar with Hill's other poems, you will certainly enjoy this ride. If not, you may wish to start with some of Hill's earlier works, which are also wonderful (in his "Collected Poems").

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ho, ho, ho., February 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Triumph of Love (Hardcover)

Geoffrey Hill's new poem is - amongst other things - an enormous "blague": "a satire upon stupidity...a weapon of the intelligence at bay". A comedy (commedia) in the fullest sense, it is packed with excruciating in-jokes, false leads and obscurities whose very purpose seems to be to satirize the insistance of our media culture on instantaneous public "accessibility". Half intimate portrait, half erudite "gotcha", the poem is by turns dazzling, exasperating and *very* funny: a prize for the patient and demanding reader, and a wet haddock in the face for everyone else (critics and academics included).

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars MADDENING!, September 4, 2009

By 

Donald A. Newlove (Greenwich Village) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Triumph of Love (Paperback)

Out of some forty or so reviews on Amazon, this is the first time I have given a book or CD a mere three stars rather than five -- and feel humiliated to do so, because facing Hill I am intellectually short-changed. I find Geoffrey Hill in THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE crushed by the melancholy of learning -- and by history as well, and the agonies of the 20th century. Having lived through most of the 20th century, I find his references to Chamberlain and other disasters aren't beyond me. The first reviewer above (or below) says he read TRIUMPH OF LOVE three times, the third with a dictionary and an encyclopedia, and achieved satori. Much recent poetry is hard to take in on a single reading, although reading aloud helps (as I did with Hill--well, the words I could pronounce -- and I did find some personal, feelingful passages, believe me!) but upon rereading an unfamiliar poet is often moving and worth my effort -- as Hill may yet prove to be. Marina Tsvetaeva, for instance, is hard to read, her prose much less so than her verse -- although I understand that in Russian even her prose gets surreal and more demanding and distant than in English, but nonetheless I am carried away by her and seek out all her work, prose and verse. Despite my horror over TRIUMPH OF LOVE, I have ordered his SELECTED POEMS that's out this year and will give him one more chance. Even more large hearted of me, I've ordered his recent COLLECTED CRITICAL ESSAYS from the library though I am fearful, fearful, fearful of it.