Geoffrey Hill (1) (1932–2016)

This took me a long time to read, which suggests that it wasn't quite as good as other Hill books. There are too many poems addressed to people I've never heard of or people who don't really need to have poems addressed to them (Stanley Rosen, for instance, great scholar though he may be; Jimi Hendrix, though a wonderful guitarist; Hart Crane, a decent enough poet). The Pindarics to Pavese bored me to begin with, but I quite liked them by the end. From 20:

Someone there has made a chalk drawing
of the common man. In history-time
he came and went so patient he was blind,
blinded, even, a tommy on Somme duckboards;
and his patience was brought against him,
a servitude or an indictment.
If what I grope for lies above the mud-lid
we shall at some point grasp his calvary.
Other than the story this tells nothing--

If nothing else, it makes me want to read Pavese.

Another favorite stanza from a poem i.m. Ken Smith:

Delete delenda est--exemplary
Carthage her rubbed-in wounds.
Not everything's a joke but we've been had.

The last line should be this century's motto.… (mehr)

A very slender percentage of poetry readers will be drawn to a book with this title. Not only will it put off the chamomile tea set, it will probably also put off the experimenters. Nothing quite like a modernist naming his collection after a seventeenth century prose pamphlet by Milton to get the cash registers ringing.

In any case, this is probably a bit easier on the brain than some of Hill's other work, at least on the first read through, since there are fairly obvious concrete referents for each poem. I regret, as I always do, the older poet's tendency to start writing In Memoriam poems. I understand the urge. If I have to read a memorial poem, Gillian Rose is a worthy subject. I just wish the urge to commemorate could be separated from the urge to publish.

Otherwise, the usual mixture of remarkable sounds, intimidating erudition (which lets mere mortals like you or me learn new words, always fun: debridement, slub, fettled, glowery--still don't know what it means, scarped, puddler, skirling) and worthy thought.

Completely random examples:

"Sibylline interdicts spells blunder - resign! -
though resignation itself proclaims the finder"

Do I know what this means? No. Do I care? No.

"a full pavane of the elect"

Wonderful.

"Jonson also was excellent on work
within his mansions of erected wit.
For him it was defiance of the mob"

I like Jonson even more.

"Before you can say Quid or Obtuse Angle
or Mrs Nanicantipot, the milk tooth
hangs from the door-knob by its cotton thread.
Terror is opportune as is relief from terror."

Handel's Op 6, "each of itself a treatise of civil power/ every phrase instinct with deliberation/ both upon power and towards civility."

This is obviously not for everyone.… (mehr)

Theology makes good bedside reading. Some
who are lost covet scholastic proof,
subsistence of probation, modest balm.

This is a very mixed bag of verse, one which astounds, confounds, unnerves and sometimes squeaks from its own strain. Very human, that. Culled from a number of collections, Hill finds it necessary to not only lament, but to cite -- once he became an academic. Book titles clutter stanzas in an odd jumble.

Clamorous love, its faint and baffled shout,
its grief that would betray him to our fear,
he suffers for our sake, or does not hear

I happen to love that vantage of Christianity and its unfortunate, often bewildered, savior. As noted, I lost a close friend this week and then found some solace as my wife and I saw Bob Dylan perform. These twinned offerings, which yield and smote during our harvest bend remind us, it is something, some thing to be alive.

Where.
you will say, does explanation
end and confession begin?… (mehr)

Read a bad review of this at the time of release, and so put off reading it because I was expecting a stuffy, reactionary type of collection - having prejudged Hill based on his position in the canon.

Actually, it's great - and the criticism (on rereading it) was actually a complaint that Clavics is too dissonant and dense, as I'm told Hill often is (such that I almost wondered if it was written in a Concrete/cut-up method). But this is very much My Bag. It builds to good effect, and with a magisterial command of the English language. It's supposedly about seventeenth century English musician William Lawes, not that you'd really know it. What it's more obviously about, is poetry itself.… (mehr)