At his death in 2016, Geoffrey Hill left behind The Book of Baruch
by the Gnostic Justin, his last work, a sequence of more than 270
poems, to be published posthumously as his final statement. Written
in long lines of variable length, with much off-rhyme and internal
rhyme, the verse-form of the book stands at the opposite end from
the ones developed in the late Daybooks of Broken Hierarchies
(2013), where he explored highly taut constructions such as Sapphic
meter, figure-poems, fixed rhyming strophes, and others. The looser
metrical plan of the new book admits an enormous range of tones of
voices. Thematically, the work is a summa of a lifetime's
meditation on the nature of poetry. A riot of similes about the
poetic art makes a passionate claim for the enduring strangeness of
poetry in the midst of its evident helplessness. The relation
between art and spirituality is another connecting thread. In
antiquity, Justin's gnostic Book of Baruch was identified as the
'worst of heresies,' and the use of it in Hill's poem, as well as
the references to alchemy, heterodox theological speculation, and
the formal logics of mathematics, music, and philosophy are made
coolly, as art and as emblems for our inadequate and perplexed
grasp of time, fate, and eternity. A final set of themes is
autobiographical, including Hill's childhood, the bombing of
London, his late trip to Germany, his alarm and anger at Brexit,
and his sense of decline and of death close at hand. It is a great
work, and in Hill's oeuvre it is a uniquely welcoming work, open to
all comers.
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