ALMOST 40 years after the appearance of his first volume, Geoffrey Hill still represents a crux in contemporary British poetry. In a sea of issue-driven demotic verse, his florid and charmless meditations could not be more unfashionable. Responses to his work have no middle ground. Poems in which Tom Paulin has smelt "a shabby and reactionary hegemony" have in turn struck Michael Longley as "exquisite, immaculate music".
Canaan, his first full-length collection for 17 years, should do little to reconcile such extremes.
For Irish readers new to his work, a useful parallel can be drawn between Hill's position in Britain with Thomas Kinsella's here. Very close in age, both work at aloof and intimidating removes from their contemporaries, with only sporadic publications. Both are self-conscious scholars, embodying the poet as austere craftsman and literary moralist. And both have infuriated some readers and critics by refusing to dilute the essential difficulties of language and its contexts for the sake of mere communication.
Hill's new collection is made up of several extended sequences, complemented by shorter lyrics which act as grace notes and counter-melodies. At least half of the sequences are curiously fragmentary, composed of several poems of the same title scattered throughout the book. The book as a whole is intent on recreating a visionary sense of England and Englishness by invoking the violence and heroic sacrifice of that country's recent past.
Hill's poetry has always been informed by a sense of history's undercurrent that is, in Christopher Rick's much-quoted phrase, "at once urgent and timeless". Increasingly, the immediate political surface has begun to echo through his work, though if only in odd words and oblique syntactical shifts:
privatize to the dead her memory:
let her wounds weep into the lens of oblivion.
Formally, Canaan finds Hill at his most modernist and risk-taking since the publication of his masterpiece, Mercian Hymns, in 1971. Gone is the long half-rhyming syllabic pentameter of his last excursions. These days the basic Hill implement is a gorgeous little sinewy two-beat line, peppered with unexpected enjambments and punctuations. This isn't to suggest that Hill has let his hair down. The effect, on the contrary, is to make his work seem even more densely wrought than ever before.
Canaan uses the proper names of places, people and wildflowers to hypnotic effect:
with the ragwort and the willow-herb as edifiers of ruined things.
Its topography is decidedly pre-20th century, littered with church spires and fens. The broken sequence "Dark-Land" names Ely, Cambridge and Dedham among others, and alludes to heroes of English mysticism like Bunyan and Blake. Elsewhere there is even, most overtly, a homage to the art of John Constable.
Yet for all their post-industrialist epiphanies, there is something furtively futuristic in Hill's present vision of England. It is a future in which English sovereignty has been dissolved by what would appear to be a federalist Europe, "its freedom a lost haul of entailed riches". Even the book's religious poems have a definite political intent, drawing on biblical references to disinherited peoples. The final movement of "Churchill's Funeral", which first appeared separately as an elegy for the dead of the first World War under the title "Carnival", contains an image of the televised public representative which is almost Orwellian:
The spouting head spiked as prophetic is ancient news.
"Churchill's Funeral" is possibly the book's finest single poem. Its five lithe movements invoke an older, more noble nation through images of London in the blitz that flicker like "scratched heroic film". The opening lines go so far as to say plainly that English society has yearned ever since for the communion that "her darkest hour" necessitated:
Endless London mourns for that knowledge under the dim roofs of smoke-stained glass, the men hefting their accoutrements of webbed tin, many in bandages, with cigarettes, with scuffed hands aflare, as though exhaustion drew them to life.
This is glorious. It is also, however, quite disturbing. Hill's invocation of societal simplicity created by the Blitz is also a nostalgia for the worst carnage in his country's modern history. The choice of a word like "knowledge", for example, above a more obvious alternative like "memory", implies a level of understanding borne only of absolute suffering, and even an eroticism in mutilation.
This ambiguity of tone and phrasing is the basis for much of the equivocation that surrounds Hill's poetry. That, coupled with his apparent indifference to the here-and-now, has led to a caricature of the great man among young English poets as a reactionary dinosaur still inhabiting Coleridge's "spiritual, Platonic England".
Even Hill's nearest and dearest can't but concede the justification of some of the doubts. At times his density of syntax lapses into cloying self-regard, sifting through a "terrain he has won from but not won". And he seems keener than ever to swallow his role as the agonised visionary, peddling a mystical perception of motherland that is poetically and historically dubious.
DESPITE the many doubts, Hill remains one of the few original and great stylists writing in the language. Where most poets of his years find it impossible to resist the proven formula, Canaan dares important progressions and for that alone should be applauded.
The contemporaneity of any poem is finally established by its formal movement rather than its terms of reference. Hill is still, therefore, at the cutting edge. His formal restlessness and resolutions amount to an ongoing master class for any young poet with enough wit to pay attention.
In the current climate Geoffrey Hill's position should be valued as an antidote to the leftist mutual congratulation that has become the mainstay of poetry's Establishment. The poems themselves, ever attentive to "origin and consequence", can be so opaque and dense that their very difficulty is illuminating, their density refreshing. And, for all the pomp and heraldry, they contain nuggets in which "common things glitter uncommonly".