Praise for Geoffrey Hill's newest collection of poems: "Without Title, his new collection, combines the force and freedom of Hill's narrative verse with a renewed faith in his masterly talents for form and wordplay. The result is alarmingly good; a collection of lyrics on the difficulties of ageing, the problems of belief and the vagaries of language bracketing a sequence of pindarics in which Hill, ostensibly responding to thoughts of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese, meditates at length on both their lives and considers the place of a poet in the world."-Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday
With our minds and ears fouled by degraded public speech how do we begin to think and speak honestly? At a time when our common language has been made false and ugly, how does the artist find words to communicate truth and beauty? Geoffrey Hill addresses these questions in these poems.
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."
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.
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.
Why is a cardinal red and a bluebird blue? How has color camouflage evolved? These are just a few of the fascinating questions explored in this work on coloration and plumage, and their key role in avian life. 200 full-color photos.
'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.
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.
