Author Description

"Necessity is a collection of poems that register ways in which we recognise our freedoms - social, spiritual, personal," says Hill, of his fifth published volume of poetry. "It starts with an elegy to my trade-unionist father and ends in a Buddhist temple in the Himalayas, where I was a couple of years ago. In between, the poems set up a dialogue with loved ones, with friends, and with the ghosts of literary forebears in response to romanticism and its revolutionary tradition. Two cantos, one on the Russian Revolution, the other on Shelley's radical idealism, are also dialogues with my son, Joe. The first was sparked by our discussions about Lenin, when he was doing sixth form history: our argument was all too reminiscent of the rows I used to have with my father when I was a boy. The Shelley poem was a way of talking about 'ideas', while responding to the walks and climbs my son and I used to do on the Bogong High Plains." Throughout the collection, Hill shadows collective events and calamities in various settings - Leningrad, Warsaw, Rome, and Calcutta, as well as Melbourne, most notably the MUA dispute on the waterfront in 1998. The central section of Necessity, 'The Prince', invokes, according to Hill, "notions of civic nobility to engage with history in the spirit of Gramsci's 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.'" "The poems register, in different ways, Marx's aphorism that 'freedom is the recognition of necessity.' But it is not a Marxist book, far from it: towards the end of the collection, the necessities also include my own deepening compulsion towards Buddhism. There is no 'contradiction' here, as, I hope, the poems suggest. When I got to India, and had to write poems arising from matters of the spirit, I was the same person who takes strength from the traditions of resistance that live in Europe and Australia."