Author Description

This volume brings together the poems from Geoffrey Hill's earlier books - For the Unfallen (1959), King Log (1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), Tenebrae (1978), The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1983), Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres (1984) - and a number of new poems and sequences of poems. 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. Alvarez has written, "He is a myth-maker... in a language so thickened and strengthened as to give the continual effect of muscular effort... (He) leaves you not so much with statements to be understood intellectually as with physical states to be shared". Harold Bloom has described Hill as "the strongest British poet now alive... He should be read for many generations after (his contemporaries) have blended together, just as he should survive all but a handful (or fewer) of American poets now active". His newest poems include a massive commemoration of Winston Churchill, an elegy on the death of William Arrowsmith, and a beautiful mysterious lyric, entitled "Respublica", reflecting on the nature of public existence.