'Clavics' is intended as a tribute to early 17th-century poetry and music, in the form of an elegiac sequence for William Lawes, the Royalist musician killed at the Battle of Chester.
A collection of scholarly essays on Geoffrey Hill, including pioneering work by Rowan Williams and Christopher Ricks, which provides insights into the cultural, literary, political, and theological complexities of a figure thought by many to be the finest living English poet.
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.
How do poems communicate moral ideas? Can they express concepts in ways that are unique and impossible to replicate in other forms of writing? This book explores these questions by turning to two of the late twentieth century's most important poets: Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Their work shows that a poem can act as an example of a moral concept, rather than simply a description or discussion of it. Exploring these two poets via their shared preoccupation with poetry's moral exemplarity opens up new perspectives on their work. The concept of exemplarity is shown to play an important role in these poets' most significant preoccupations, from moral complicity to the nature of lyric speech to literary influence to memorialisation, responsibility, and aesthetic autonomy. Through this new analysis of poetry, critical prose, drama, and archival materials, this book offers a major new study of ethics in the later period of these two writers—including recent underexplored posthumous works. In turn, the book also makes an important intervention in larger debates about literature and morality, and about the field of ethical criticism itself: this is the first book-length study to expand ethical criticism beyond its customary narrative focus. The ethical criticism of fiction is often an exercise in methodological advocacy, urging the use of more literary examples in moral philosophy. As this book shows, including poetry among these examples introduces new, lyric-inflected caveats about the use of literature as a form of moral example: caveats which remain invisible in narrative-centred ethical criticism.
Geoffrey Hill's poems are like those of no other living poet. Grand in their music, powerful in their impact, they are public poetry, poetry dealing with religion, with the state of England, poetry as a lamentation for the human condition. As A.
Odi Barbare is the second in Geoffrey Hill's sequence The Daybooks, and the third to be published. It was preceded by Daybooks III: Oraclau Oracles (2010) and Daybooks IV: Clavics (2011). The others in the series, to appear in the Collected Poems 1952-2012 from Oxford University Press in 2013, are: Al Tempo de' Tremuoti and Liber Illustrium Virorum. In the present sequence Hill uses the 'Sapphic' verse form - 're-cadencing' the example of Sir Philip Sidney - with extraordinary discipline and expressive energy to address 'this dyingTime that bends so beautifully around things' and now beats back 'more than it delivers', work that requires 'intelligent patience' but wants the time such patience needs.
An exploration of the later work of Geoffrey Hill, often described as ‘the greatest living poet’ in his lifetime. This book reads, interprets, evaluates, and sets in context the work of Hill’s prolific later period from 1996 to 2016, the year of his death.
On December 16, 1967, five adventurous boys from one of the Island’s elite high schools, Jamaica College, set out into the majestic Blue Mountains in search of a mythical trail, endeavouring to reach its highest point, the Peak, at elevation 7402 feet. They never made it.A platoon of soldiers dispatched to the area where it was believed that the boys began their hike along the Blue Mountain Ridge, reported that they were never there or had vanished into the jungle. The soldiers turned back.After almost ten days in heavily forested terrain described as “inaccessible as any place in the world, and perhaps where no man has ever trodden,” they found themselves hopelessly lost, trapped, and far from a living soul. Cold and starving, they probably only had hours to live.This is the story of the harrowing journey that would make headlines and test the character of five boys as they faced down death on their way to manhood. Using eyewitness accounts, maps and never-before-seen photographs, the author tracks the action from an innocent plan hatched during Christmas break to the dramatic, last-ditch efforts to rescue the boys.In 1967, Geoffrey Haddad was a curious Jamaica College student with a passion for the outdoors. He was one of the five.