Geoffrey Hill

[quasimodo1]

"For more than 50 years, however, Geoffrey Hill has written a pinch-mouthed, grave-digger’s poetry so rich and allusive his books are normally greeted by gouts of praise from critics and the bewilderment of readers who might have been happier with a tract on the mating rituals of the earwig." FROM THE REVIEW -- { Living With Ghosts By WILLIAM LOGAN
Published: January 20, 2008 } ---- TREATISE OF CIVIL POWER

By Geoffrey Hill. ------ "The late Peter Porter once remarked on the tendency

of contemporary poets to turn themselves into stand-up comedians, so concerned are they to

appeal to a world that appears to be turning its back on their art. Hill will have nothing to

do with such nonsense. His is a serious poetry about serious things. Sometimes he can seem too

serious, forbidding to the point of rebarbativeness. Still, I'd rather have the

rebarbativeness, replete as it is with exquisite effects, than the purveyors of performance

doggerel seeking to lighten my day. There are perhaps a handful of poets whose work will

survive into the 22nd century. In my view, Hill is one of them." -- quote from article -from The Australian -- http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/great-poetry-is-no-scandal/story-e6frgcjx-

1225900776230 ----- {for some examples of Geoffrey Hill's poetry -- http://books.google.com/books?

hl=en&lr=&id=LRoCcr1_U0AC&oi=fnd&pg=PR3&dq=Geoffrey+Hill+poetry&ots=zQj7H65UEf&sig=yjotDRIVs10

PI2q8-qBizCakQAM#v=onepage&q=Geoffrey%20Hill%20poetry&f=false }

[stlukesguild]

Quasi... I quite like Geoffrey Hill. His poems are certainly "difficult"... but more in the manner of T.S. Eliot than Joyce. His language is equally dense... not unlike Milton or even Hopkins. I must post a few poems or fragments here.

[sixsmith]

I too am a fan of Hill, though I can't claim to be across a significant portion of his oeuvre. I enjoy high-minded allusivness and unyielding moralism and, so far as my limited reading of him goes, Hill ticks those boxes.


September Song
born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.


In Memory of Jane Fraser

When snow like sheep lay in the fold
And wind went begging at each door,
And the far hills were blue with cold,
And a cloud shroud lay on the moor,

She kept the siege. And every day
We watched her brooding over death
Like a strong bird above its prey.
The room filled with the kettle's breath

.....

She died before the world could stir.
In March the ice unloosed the brook
And water ruffled the sun's hair.
Dead cones upon the alder shook.

(I've replaced your link Quasi: it appears to have expired)>
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/great-poetry-is-no-scandal/story-e6frgcjx-1225900776230

[quasimodo1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51g-hrs5oVc Geoffrey Hill reciting "The Storm"

[quasimodo1]

Geoffrey Hill
-- March 11, 2001
Muse of Brimstone (a review)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In his new volume of poetry, Geoffrey Hill revisits the 120 days of Sodom. By DAVID BROMWICH --- "First day of the first week: rain
on perennial ground cover, a sheen
like oil of verdure where the rock shows through;
dark ochre patched more dark, with stubborn glaze;
rough soggy drystone clinging to the fell,
broken by hawthorns. What survives
of memory / you can call indigenous
if you recall anything." from the volume of poems - ''Speech! Speech!'' -- {context for this excerpt -- http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/03/11/reviews/010311.11bromwit.html }

[quasimodo1]

Geoffrey Hill -- from "Mercian Hymns VI" -------------------------- c Ruth Padel, 1999

`Mercian Hymns VI' is taken from Collected Poems (Penguin)

Mercian Hymns VI

"The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall

to their freedom, I dug and hoarded. Orchards

fruited above clefts. I drank from honeycombs of

chill sandstone.

"A boy at odds in the house, lonely among brothers."

But I, who had none, fostered a strangeness; gave

myself to unattainable toys.

Candles of gnarled resin, apple-branches, the tacky

mistletoe. "Look," they said and again, "look". But

I ran slowly; the landscape flowed away, back to

its source.

In the schoolyard, in the cloakrooms, the children

boasted their scars of dried snot; wrists and

knees garnished with impetigo." ---

[quasimodo1]

Paris Review interview... Geoffrey Hill, The Art of Poetry No. 80
Interviewed by Carl Phillips --- { http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill } [THANK YOU sixsmith for updating that link]

[quasimodo1]

Passionate intelligence: the poetry of Geoffrey Hill By E. M. Knottenbelt: --- "Hill is a critic and scholar of repute. A collection of essays, 'The Lords of Limit,'

appeared in 1984. But Hill was and is firsrt and foremost a poet, and is considered by many

to be the most outstanding poet writing in English today. This is not because he is a

prolific poet, for he as only five fairly slim volumes to his name, collected since 1985 in a

King Penguin edition. Furthermore, the wider recognition Hill now enjoys has come slowly and

he is still relatively little read, in spite of the fact that he has been publishing (and

giving readings of his poetry) regularly since 1951 and in 1952 his Fantasy Press pamphlet

immediately caught the attention of the literary world. Hill's singular position may stem

from the difficulty of his poetry (he has been called a 'poet's poet'), that difficulty

contributing to its singularity. In a period more overtly preoccupied with the self, Hill's

verse is determinedly non-confessional, reticent. It is more intellectual and literary than

most other contemporary English poetry, and none at the moment is more suffused with history:

some say, to the point of its being anachronistic. Anglo-saxon history, the sufferings of

Christian martyrs, the 'Revival of Christian Architecture in England' attract Hill's attention

as much as the sufferings in our own century caused by the Great War and, in particular,

Hitler's Germany. At a time when many poets have shunned the formal style and there is a

tendency towards plainness and openness, Hill's verse appears elevated and coldly austere as

well as closed and dense. And at a time when many poets, British annd American, have

rejected such Modernist devices as irony, paradox and allusion, these devices of conscious

inellection, joined to the conventional forms and techniques of English poetry, are naturally

Hill's mode. Elegance and an intimidating precision are intrinsic to the complex density and

intensity of a Hill poem, but so are its eroticism and sensuality, often violent. Yet if

these features distinguish Hill's poetry both in terms of the degree of its independence and

chosen direction, they do not in the end describe adequately either its real difficulty or

singularity and cerainly not its significance next to other contemporary poetry. It is

'strong poetry'. Intellectual, scholarly, literary and severely formal unlike anything

presently being written, it has, at the same time, an equally uncommoon passion and force. As

C.H. Sisson has said in his attempt to describe Hill's formal poetry of passion: "It is as if

the shock of experience were received in a great volume of water, so that the surface

trembling is not more than indicative." {excerpt from E.M. Knottenbelt's treatise}

[blank|verse]

It's good to read a thread on a contemporary poet, even if he is one I've yet to be convinced by - reading his poems often comes too close to being hectored by an irritable schoolmaster (or perhaps Father Christmas (http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2010/100112_1.html) given his current appearance) - but keep going with the posts, and I might come round!

At his inaugural speech as Oxford Professor of Poetry, he dismissed all modern poetry as 'landfill'. Reports of blood from his own foot pooling on the stage from this gunshot wound were unconfirmed. And at least Paul Muldoon has a sense of humour!