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Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012
Broken Hierarchies collects twenty books of poems by Geoffrey Hill, written over sixty years, and presents them in their definitive form. Four of these books (Ludo, Expostulations on the Volcano, Liber Illustrium Virorum, and Al Tempo de' Tremuoti) have never before appeared in print, and three of them (Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres, Pindarics, and Clavics) have been greatly revised and expanded.
- GenresPoetryGriefLiterature
973 pages, Hardcover
First published November 28, 2013
13 people are currently reading
255 people want to read
About the author
Geoffrey Hill
84 books49 followersLibrarian 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.
Sir Geoffrey William Hill was an English poet and professor emeritus of English literature and religion.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 2, 2014
To be re-visited again and again for the rest of my life...
February 13, 2014
I think I'll be rereading this for a very long time. and it's not as though I haven't read everything up to the day books already.
It's good to have all the poems between the same covers and there are things in here which just aren't going away. Anyone wanting to see why Hill is so highly regarded will find the evidence here. They will also see why some people despise the man's poetry. He does polarize opinions.
Whether the book stands up the way Yeats' collected has withstood almost a century of bashing remains to be seen.
It's going to take a great deal of patience to tease out the later books. My first impression is that they don't stand up against the middle period or the best of the early writing, but that impression is just that, an impression.
I still think the lack of any kind of introduction/comment on editorial process is strange.
Giving something like this points out of five is ludicrous, but it is an amazing body of work.
It's good to have all the poems between the same covers and there are things in here which just aren't going away. Anyone wanting to see why Hill is so highly regarded will find the evidence here. They will also see why some people despise the man's poetry. He does polarize opinions.
Whether the book stands up the way Yeats' collected has withstood almost a century of bashing remains to be seen.
It's going to take a great deal of patience to tease out the later books. My first impression is that they don't stand up against the middle period or the best of the early writing, but that impression is just that, an impression.
I still think the lack of any kind of introduction/comment on editorial process is strange.
Giving something like this points out of five is ludicrous, but it is an amazing body of work.
February 25, 2021
This is as much a monument as a book. It goes straight into the canon. It's like reading the complete Donne or Herbert or Hopkins. He struggled with faith more than earlier poets, yet he cuts into the illusions of a fallen world through the millennium from a uniquely English perspective that ranges from the Dark Ages to Brexit. He takes English history and nature and puts it through a strainer that reveals its horrors and beauty in a dense, revelatory manner.
June 5, 2024
This is essentially Hill's life work, so I didn't read cover-to-cover. But I truly believe he will be remembered as one of the greatest poets of the English language. Full stop.
Highly recommend his "Tenebrae" collection for starters.
Highly recommend his "Tenebrae" collection for starters.
September 13, 2025
PISGAH:
I am ashamed and grieve, having seen you then,
those many times, as now
you turn to speak
with someone standing deeper in the shade;
or fork a row, or pace to the top end
where the steep garden overlooks the house;
around you the cane loggias, tent-poles, trellises,
the flitter of sweet peas caught in their strings,
the scarlet runners, blossom that seems to burn
an incandescent aura towards evening.
This half-puzzled, awkward surprise is yours;
you cannot hear me or quite make me out.
Formalities preserve us:
perhaps I too am a shade.
***
FUNERAL MUSIC (8):
Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us—or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.
***
‘The Turtle Dove’:
Love that drained her drained him she’d loved, though each
For the other’s sake forged passion upon speech,
Bore their close days through sufferance towards night
Where she at length grasped sleep and he lay quiet
As though needing no questions, now, to guess
what her secreting heart could not well hide.
Her caught face flinched in half-sleep at his side.
Yet she, by day, modelled her real distress,
Poised, turned her cheek to the attending world
Of children and intriguers and the old,
Conversed freely, exercised, was admired,
Being strong to dazzle. All this she endured
To affront him. He watched her rough grief work
Under the formed surface of habit. She spoke
Like one long undeceived but she was hurt.
She denied more love, yet her starved eyes caught
His, devouring, at times. Then, as one self-dared,
She went to him, plied there; like a furious dove
Bore down with visitations of such love
As his lithe, fathoming heart absorbed and buried.
***
‘Christmas Trees’:
Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares’ candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,
restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.
Against wild reasons of the state
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.
***
And finally; three of the finest lines ever written, from ‘The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz’:
COPLAS.
i
‘One cannot lose what one has not possessed.’
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lose what I want. I want you.
March 6, 2018
Astounding find. I was just about unconsciously positive that there has been, is nothing for me in Barnes & Noble for many years save the occasional book and tin of tea by use of a gift-card; for whatever reason I found yrstruly wandering/wimwendering/wondering if one in the vicinity had anything going on and found this Tome. I believe another reviewer here mentions revisiting throughout life - undoubtedly. Perhaps one could leave Broken Hierarchies up unto the point of this public catalog undergoing digital fossilization and it would be a fair gesture to assume one who hath declared mutiny, abandoned ship by way of casket, took this book back into the primitive seminary for poetic atheists. I would be, am, unable to remember any other sneeze leading me into an exterior Proustian tea fume as the allergy-driven sneeze that led me to take inquisitional refuge in the poetics of a corporate charlatan entangled rectangular with Gothic harlot, low & low. Blessed be Fortuna; let us turn on the anthem and maximize our speakers as we orate Hill and set the filtered water steaming!
December 21, 2017
Powerful
February 28, 2020
I read maybe 3/5 of this, not the whole thing, but God. These are some great poems.
March 7, 2023
not like "finished" but i put it back on my bookshelf for now. amazing consistent stuff
June 10, 2023
A monumental collection, if occasionally exhausting insofar as it could use a similarly long volume of notes and commentary to help follow it.
March 11, 2022
It is really hard to explain for the benefit of someone unacquainted with his work what makes Geoffrey Hill so compelling. Crammed with vocabulary that probably goes back to Saxon times languages plus a deep knowledge of local dialects from all across England, and he is very much an English poet. This is not to mention his command of other languages. Dense with allusions to a phenomenal range of literature, history and probably a great deal of purely personal life events that leaves the reader with only the most fleeting grasp of any actual semantic content in Hill's text. It is so close to being totally opaque as to make hardly any difference. Hill's model would seem to be Pound, a tangled stream of consciousness that flows from theme to theme with divisions into separate poems as dreamily ambiguous as his imagery. A Pound for the late 20th early 21st Century, but a kinder, sadder, less abrasive Pound.
The voice is pretty much uniform throughout, male, disembodied, aged, disappointed and stoically embittered full of blackest irony. On this basis it can hardly seem credible that there is much to appeal in Hill's work to anyone of the slightest optimistic temperament. But it is the language and just the language that lifts him into realms of a clear literary grandeur and a surprisingly universal impersonality.
Glorious imagery from nature, from architecture, from historical imagination, culture high and low, even jurisprudence, make certain lines and stanzas sparkle despite the morbidity of the apparent surface meaning. Breathtaking twists of syntax keep the attention sustained, but above all the shear musicality that comes with one word choice after another that creates a smoothly flowing stream of language that transcends whatever the semantic content that might be trying to find expression and always failing. The music created is deeply painful but also somehow deeply soothing and leaves one perpetually suspended on the edge of a breakthrough into some redemptive higher dimension. The syntactic sparking is not as disruptively unremitting as say Prynne or Sutherland but is angular enough to maintain a fresh vivacity.
The book of his complete poems really reads like one great long poem moving hypnotically, without ever resting on any particular theme or subject. Titles, either of collections or occasionally of particular poems, are as obliquely allusive as the rest of the content. Often one might pick up a literary allusion; Dante, Lowry, Pindar, etc., and certain keywords might intrude for a while for the next ten or twenty pages, but the work consistently taunts that part of the reader's mind that struggles to interpret, to arrive at any wisp of meaning, let alone canonical. It is all about riding on the language and letting it speak to us out of whole other levels. Reminiscent in fact, of the of Joyce's of Finnegan, but much more tender and dreamlike, and certainly radically less humorous.
It has taken me almost two months to get to the end of this first journey into Hill's poetic mindscape, I have been reading other things as well, trying not to read so much poetry at a sitting that one is just scanning without engagement. It takes a lot of concentration to read just a few pages of his work. Having arrived at the end I am faced with a dilemma: do I move on to another poet? Bunting, Patchen and Prynne are lined up. Or do I go back to the start and start a second, deeper reading of Hill? Track down the allusions, look up the unfamiliar vocabulary, ponder the syntax more deeply till other meanings emerge. I think this is what I am going to do, because I read poetry as a poet, hoping for a little osmosis by which to absorb techniques, vocabulary, shear vision even. And though I by no means wish to write quite so opaquely as Hill I would still love to acquire something of his flow and music.
There. I've tried to explain what might be worth investigating in Hill's oeuvre. With what success I have no idea. There's no denying that Hill is difficult. Difficult in a way that makes Eliot and Yeats seem almost superficial. But you can't read Hill without feeling the pressure of layers of refractory meanings trying to unfold within the mind. Like the best works of art one could well read Hill without having quite the same experience for the rest of one's life.
The voice is pretty much uniform throughout, male, disembodied, aged, disappointed and stoically embittered full of blackest irony. On this basis it can hardly seem credible that there is much to appeal in Hill's work to anyone of the slightest optimistic temperament. But it is the language and just the language that lifts him into realms of a clear literary grandeur and a surprisingly universal impersonality.
Glorious imagery from nature, from architecture, from historical imagination, culture high and low, even jurisprudence, make certain lines and stanzas sparkle despite the morbidity of the apparent surface meaning. Breathtaking twists of syntax keep the attention sustained, but above all the shear musicality that comes with one word choice after another that creates a smoothly flowing stream of language that transcends whatever the semantic content that might be trying to find expression and always failing. The music created is deeply painful but also somehow deeply soothing and leaves one perpetually suspended on the edge of a breakthrough into some redemptive higher dimension. The syntactic sparking is not as disruptively unremitting as say Prynne or Sutherland but is angular enough to maintain a fresh vivacity.
The book of his complete poems really reads like one great long poem moving hypnotically, without ever resting on any particular theme or subject. Titles, either of collections or occasionally of particular poems, are as obliquely allusive as the rest of the content. Often one might pick up a literary allusion; Dante, Lowry, Pindar, etc., and certain keywords might intrude for a while for the next ten or twenty pages, but the work consistently taunts that part of the reader's mind that struggles to interpret, to arrive at any wisp of meaning, let alone canonical. It is all about riding on the language and letting it speak to us out of whole other levels. Reminiscent in fact, of the of Joyce's of Finnegan, but much more tender and dreamlike, and certainly radically less humorous.
It has taken me almost two months to get to the end of this first journey into Hill's poetic mindscape, I have been reading other things as well, trying not to read so much poetry at a sitting that one is just scanning without engagement. It takes a lot of concentration to read just a few pages of his work. Having arrived at the end I am faced with a dilemma: do I move on to another poet? Bunting, Patchen and Prynne are lined up. Or do I go back to the start and start a second, deeper reading of Hill? Track down the allusions, look up the unfamiliar vocabulary, ponder the syntax more deeply till other meanings emerge. I think this is what I am going to do, because I read poetry as a poet, hoping for a little osmosis by which to absorb techniques, vocabulary, shear vision even. And though I by no means wish to write quite so opaquely as Hill I would still love to acquire something of his flow and music.
There. I've tried to explain what might be worth investigating in Hill's oeuvre. With what success I have no idea. There's no denying that Hill is difficult. Difficult in a way that makes Eliot and Yeats seem almost superficial. But you can't read Hill without feeling the pressure of layers of refractory meanings trying to unfold within the mind. Like the best works of art one could well read Hill without having quite the same experience for the rest of one's life.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews