Without Title

by Geoffrey Hill

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

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

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

If one were to take a step back and look at Hill's poetry, from the Triumph of Love to the present, you would see one of the longest goodbyes in poetry history. But it's a goodbye wrapped in ongoing complaint. Or is he bargaining with a distant God at his own oaks of Mamre? And about what? I don't know. Getting old, maybe. But the notion that that is the dark pearl at the heart of all of Hill's impenetrably barouque musings, seems wrong, but that sense of wrongness is based on Hill's powerful poetry up through his Canaan collection. Now? Whatever. I'm just not into the heavy lifting that is required this time. Actually, the first part of this collection has some of the best poetry he's written since Canaan. But what follows is a long sequence of Pindaric Odes that both bored me and lost me at the same time. I've seen this kind of thing from Hill before, and I'm tired of it. He's like Shakespeare's Richard III, in his Poetry Tent, barking out a one-sided dialogue to Ghosts of Poets Past. But not just any poets, but poets that Hill admires for some obscure biographical reason or another. I have no doubt there's some sort of brilliant thread buried in it all, I'm just not picking it up this time.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took me a long time to read, which suggests that it wasn't quite as good as other Hill books. There are too many poems addressed to people I've never heard of or people who don't really need to have poems addressed to them (Stanley Rosen, for instance, great scholar though he may be; Jimi Hendrix, though a wonderful guitarist; Hart Crane, a decent enough poet). The Pindarics to Pavese bored me to begin with, but I quite liked them by the end. From 20:

Someone there has made a chalk drawing
of the common man. In history-time
he came and went so patient he was blind,
blinded, even, a tommy on Somme duckboards;
and his patience was brought against him,
a servitude or an indictment.
If what I grope for lies above the mud-lid
we shall at some point grasp his calvary.
Other than the story this tells nothing--

If nothing else, it makes me want to read Pavese.

Another favorite stanza from a poem i.m. Ken Smith:

Delete delenda est--exemplary
Carthage her rubbed-in wounds.
Not everything's a joke but we've been had.

The last line should be this century's motto.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it's inappropriate to use the star rating system on Hill's work. He is never less than daunting. But some shading is needed to distinguish between that stunning run of 'Canaan', "the Triumph of Love', "The Orchards of Syon" and "Speech Speech" which went off the scale and the books that followed which modulated into a different register, if not into a lesser quality.

[Mary Soon Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I lack the knowledge to appreciate this poetry collection by the acclaimed British poet, Geoffrey Hill. Reading it, I felt the same confusion that I sometimes feel reading T. S. Eliot. But when reading Eliot, I am less lost than I was here, and the beauty of Eliot's language holds me even when I am lost. This did not. I perceived that the author was serious in his intent; that he liked wordplay; that these poems speak of mortality, old age, and poetry itself. Yet I found the poems inaccessible, and was moved only rarely (usually by references to nature: plants, trees, birds).

A less ignorant reader would presumably like these poems better. The start of the first poem in the collection may be enough to determine this. The poem is titled "Improvisation on 'O Welt ich muss dich lassen'" and the opening four lines are:

Traurig as one is between bearers, dancers,
old comrades from the Crem or at the Palais,
that's not the issue. Can't decide among
the cheap comedians. I do panic.

With the aid of the internet, I deciphered the German in the title and the poem's first word, yet even then remained largely baffled.

The poems I liked best were "The Jumping Boy," which has a lightness to it as it returns (I think) to the narrator's childhood; "Offertorium: Suffolk, July 2003," with its specific, detailed invocation of nature; the brief, melancholic "Luxe, Calme et Volupte," and "Epiphany at Hurcott," especially for its lovely last line, which could almost be a minimalist poem by itself:

The lake, reflective, floats, brimfull, its tawny sky.