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“... fields of EEC oil seed rape and travelled up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off ...”

“... that you should not calumniate the unnamed, or incite parlour-game guesswork about poetry. (Is it Geoffrey Hill? Fifteen sonnets doesn’t fit, though there would be something boldly winsome about offering Hill as your example of the poet insufficiently dedicated to his art.) Even more important, there is the assertive ...”

“... the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs matter ...”

“... find – worse than a Diary of Shakespeare footnotes – that it consists entirely of letters on Geoffrey Hill, each giving rank and serial number and ancestral details to the third generation. Berk’s Peerage, or the Variorum Donsiad. On page 3 lolls Tom Paulin, clad in nothing but the Report of the New Ireland Forum. I wake in a lather, and have to ...”

“... an umbel, a botanical cluster some of us have never heard of? Or why would a poet dig up the echo? Geoffrey Hill writes of a tendency to ‘crave ambiguity in plain speaking/as I do’ (in ‘In Memoriam: Ernst Barlach’), but Rimbaud seems to be mocking the poverty of his mother tongue, its miserly repetition of similar sounds for such different ...”

“... Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the subtitle of the book as an ...”

“... and Seventies, rest within the lyric’s privilege? Does Ted Hughes, or James Merrill? Does Geoffrey Hill, in The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy? Does Donald Davie? As critic, Davie is ‘chiefly arguing’ for this: ‘that Milosz, like a few other ambitious poets of his time, refuses to be restricted in his poetry to the lyric genre or ...”

“... junked if it were to be made good. With some obviously difficult writers – Henry James, say, or Geoffrey Hill – one has the sense that a tangled world is being masterfully comprehended. With Paterson (as with Browning, the shadowy double who haunts this volume), it seems rather that simplicity is always just beyond him, whether in Scots, or in the ...”

“... powers’: Dionysius, Apollo, Orpheus, Eros and Christ, as well as the ‘Queen under the Hill’, ‘the Hornd Master’, and the ‘Consul of the Dead’. Sometimes this instinct served Duncan well, as in ‘This Place Rumourd to Have Been Sodom’, a poem that wrestles homosexuality away from the Bible’s canonical reprobation: This place rumourd ...”

“... Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative ...”

“... Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’ turns a boundary dispute between Irish farmers into a Homeric encounter. Geoffrey Hill, the modern master of the sonnet as vehicle for embedded history, reflects on the idea of England in one of the sonnets from ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’ (not ‘Loss and Gain’, the one that Burt and ...”

“... Poetic Mind – a critical book which its TLS reviewer found mystifyingly earnest but which Geoffrey Hill greatly admired – he insisted that certain verses, including some of Milton’s, were utterances of immeasurable power. Others saw something of this in Williams’s own work. Though it lost the battle of posterity and lacks the brilliant ...”

“... of influence, but baseball, too, has spread around the globe. In an essay in the latest edition, Geoffrey Nunberg notes that ‘it is rare to find a single page of an English-language novel or newspaper that does not reveal what nation it was written in,’ and although the Norton does not include a single text from its own country of publication – unless ...”

“... legendary figure upon a lettered coin, made strangely comfortable for us by being (in the words of Geoffrey Hill about a coin of Offa) ‘cushioned on a legend’. Not exactly eclipsed by Ehrenpreis’s biography, but necessarily rather occluded by it, are three recent books on Swift. F.P. Lock’s Swift’s Tory Politics draws ‘freely’ on ...”

“... certainly yielded a rich crop for cherry-pickers. Writers such as Iain Sinclair, Roy Fisher and Geoffrey Hill have found in The Anathemata elements that correspond to their own very different outlooks and have proved much of it to be relevant and capable of reinvention. There is a great deal that is interesting and valuable in The Anathemata and The ...”