Collected Poems

by Geoffrey Hill

Hailed as "the best poet writing in England" (Michael Longley, The Guardian) and "a magnificent poet" (Poetry), Geoffrey Hill has produced powerfully mythic verse that distinguishes him as a contemporary poet in allegiance with the great tradition. Complex yet spare, Hill is a poet of despair and redemption whose work contains some of contemporary poetry's most powerful moments. This collection brings together for the first time the poems appearing in five previous books, including the acclaimed long poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy; also here are three hitherto unpublished poems, Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Sir Geoffrey William Hill was an English poet and professor emeritus of English literature and religion.

Reviews

[Peter McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early in the year, I made an attempt at getting into Hill, which failed thanks to the terrible Selected Poems of Geoffrey Hill (no context at all! inexcusable for such a hard poet). But I later made another attempt, armed with a friend’s undergraduate dissertation on Hill and a different book. This mid-career collected has rather obtuse notes, but that’s infinitely better than none at all. Hill’s failure mode is writing a poem that still seems overserious and overwrought even after half an hour’s wasted labour means it’s at least no longer confusing. But in better poems (‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ is a key example) the initial confusion is the result of what, following my friend Paolo Babbiotti, I want to call Nietzschean compression. Yet Hill was no Nietzschean, and (with him more than most) Plato's lesson in the Ion must be borne in mind—without necessarily following Plato, or Tom Paulin, all the way to what Bernard Williams might have called ‘counterfactual Keatsianism’. The sequence ‘Lachrimae’ is absolutely stunning, among the best sonnets I know of, and I’m a sucker for sonnets.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

NOTE this is geoffrey's pre-meds period so this is not the absolute brick Collected that we know now. I've read a few of these collections before he's extraordinarily talented, from the ultra-Herberty For the Unfallen & the iconic Mercian Hymns (which I really liked on this reread! more so than the first time) .. .. I also enjoyed my space with King Log and Tenebrae.

as I say , he has the talent, but he slips my mind all the time. I wonder how he'll be remembered - an alcove?

[Ian Florance]

A new Collected poems is out soon but this is an early collection, based on his ground breaking earlier work. Difficult but hugely rewarding.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very difficult, best read aloud.