Customer Reviews

The Triumph of Love

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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").

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).

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.