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'Over 32 poems Geoffrey Hill traces an elegiac sequence for William
Lawes and his music, intermingling the historical events around his
death with flashes of the everyday. The result is a collection that
delights in eccentric incongruities. Ben Jonson will appear a line
after a popular instant coffee blend has been mentioned, Dante will
be found next to a mime artist, Marcel Marceau, and Lawes himself
figures auditioning for Ronnie Scott. Mr Hill actively seeks out
such juxtapositions. He will audaciously rhyme "haruspex", an
Etruscan soothsayer who saw prophecies in the entrails of victims,
with "bad sex", his poetry delighting in "a dissonance to make them
wince". Yet, as Mr Hill writes, when speaking of Lawes's tendency
to jar different musical themes, "the grace of music is its
dissonance." This discordance is part of his wider belief in the
public nature of poetry. Refusing to be a "light entertainer" like
the hypocrites in Dante's inferno, Mr Hill presents a difficult
world as he sees it. His gift lies in making such difficulty
momentarily understood.' THE ECONOMIST
A new Penguin edition of Ibsen's two great verse plays, in
masterful versions by one of our greatest living poets, Geoffrey
Hill. These two powerful and contrasting verse dramas by Ibsen made
his reputation as a playwright. The fantastical adventures of the
irrepressible Peer Gynt - poet, idler, procrastinator, seducer -
draw on Norwegian folklore to conjure up mountains, kidnappings,
shipwrecks and trolls in an exuberant examination of truth and the
self; while Brand, an unsparing vision of an idealistic priest who
lives by his steely faith, explores free will and sacrifice. This
volume brings together the poet Geoffrey Hill's acclaimed stage
version of Brand with a new poetic rendering of Peer Gynt,
published for the first time. This Penguin edition includes an
interview with Geoffrey Hill about recreating Ibsen in English, an
introduction by Janet Garton and editorial materials by Tore Rem.
This first selection of Geoffrey Hill's poetry charts the evolution
of a complex, uncompromising, visionary body of work over fifty
years. It includes poems from Hill's astonishing debut, For the
Unfallen, through the verset-sequence Mercian Hymns, to acclaimed
recent work, including The Orchards of Syon and Without Title.
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.
Broken Hierarchies collects twenty books of poems by Geoffrey Hill,
written over sixty years, and presents them in their definitive
form. Four of these books (Ludo, Expostulations on the Volcano,
Liber Illustrium Virorum, and Al Tempo de' Tremuoti) have never
before appeared in print, and three of them (Hymns to Our Lady of
Chartres, Pindarics, and Clavics) have been greatly revised and
expanded.
The last wizard is a story about a young apprentice who's life is
thrown into turmoil. He is chased by evil, his friends and masters
are dead, the land is being raped and he is the only one left to
find out the truth and to save his land. Once you start the last
wizard you enter a land of fantasy and magic, you will forget your
own problems and become drawn into an adventure of epic
proportions.
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.
Here is public poetry of uncommon moral urgency: it bears witness
to the sufferings of the innocent at the hands of history and to
the martyrdom of those who have dared look history in the eye.
"Rich, quarrelsome...handsome and brutish...Hill's poetry is the
major achievement of late-twentieth-century verse," says The New
Criterion. "Canaan is one of the few serious books we will have to
mark the millennium."
Broken Hierarchies collects twenty books of poems by Geoffrey Hill,
written over sixty years, and presents them in their definitive
form. Four of these books (Ludo, Expostulations on the Volcano,
Liber Illustrium Virorum, and Al Tempo de' Tremuoti) have never
before appeared in print, and three of them (Hymns to Our Lady of
Chartres, Pindarics, and Clavics) have been greatly revised and
expanded.
Geoffrey Hill is University Professor at Boston University. He
holds an honorary D. Litt. from the University of Leeds and is an
Honorary Fellow of both Keble College, Oxford and Emmanuel College,
Cambridge. Amongst many other recognitions of his work as a poet,
he has received the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Award. He
gave the Clark Lectures, on which this book is based, in 1986.
`Well done!' is a familiar cry with a complex sense. It may applaud
the merest knack, patronize a decent competence, or squarely
recognize something at once finely-achieved and morally just. The
language of true valuing is constantly shadowed by parodies of
itself - sales-talk, sociable politeness, or gush. The Enemy's
Country is concerned with the ways in which judgement is conveyed
through language, and with the difficulty of clearing the terms of
judgement not from but for the pressures of circumstance so that
what is said may be fitting. Poetry has sometimes been credited
with a special place as a form of conduct in language, as if it
were a world of words of its own from which the poet masterfully
dispenses a distinctly free speech. These essays enquire whether
such high praises, even when sincere, are apt to the real
conditions of poets' work, to their share of drudgery, their fears
of misapprehension or their need to please, to the entanglements of
meaning in historical communities. The 'sheer perfection' of lyric
utterance is shown to involve a recognition and acceptance of the
poet's place in `the scheme of things', a scheme of business and
accommodation which is not ideally clean but which remains a ground
of the art's refinement. Dryden is at the centre of the book.
Around his exemplary figure, Geoffrey Hill describes with biting
erudition and minutely sympathetic imagination the perplexities and
felicity of genius in writers such as Donne, Hobbes, and Marvell.
The book closes with a study of Pound's `Envoi:1919' in which Hill,
characteristically, brings together humour, scrupulousness, and
enquiring commitment to the hopes of poetry. The Enemy's Country
enacts `virtue's struggle to clear and maintain its own meaning
amid the commonplace approximation, the common practice of men'.
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