By DÎPTI SARAVANAMUTTU [Jacket Magazine] – Poets’ attitudes to poetry range from it being the most intelligent thing to do in this world, to what can be done with one hand tied behind the back. To Universal acclaim until someone notices the tied hand is someone else. Hill writes as though he could obliterate his physical body to understand and finally say this. When he mingles images of what delights with what is nauseating or distasteful, it tends to bring us back to our senses. Geoffrey Hill’s poetry composes a complex body of work, being over an era from the sixties to the present day. There was a fifteen year gap between what’s published in his Collected Poems (1985) and the next half of his work. This essay on the latter half of his work is situated from the perspective of having read and considered the work of the first twenty years.

Some of his work around the first years of the new millennium, namely Speech! Speech! (2000) and aspects of The Orchards of Syon (2002) are somewhat of a culture shock. They seem in places to identify the current belief that poetry is the most fashionable thing you can do. However when he writes poetry that is shallow or needlessly grandiose, it identifies what is missing with his most acute judgement.

Continued at Jacket Magazine | More Chronicle & Notices.