A phoenix rising from European ashes

It is impossible in a short space to convey not merely how good, but how important Geoffrey Hill’s writing is. In his mystic journey to the Goldengrove of his Worcestershire childhood this latter-day Blakean reopens problems which philosophy had long ago abandoned as intractable and which politics in its corruption had discarded. If I had to put it in a phrase, it would be: what we all lost when we lost our religion, and, at the same time, became deaf to the voices of our ancestors, their literature, their lives and thought-processes. But one can’t put it in a phrase, and that is the point.

Here comes our poet-sage ‘to bring recollection found, weeping with rage’. There is no one alive writing in our language about deeper or more important matters, no one saying such interesting things.

For the first two or three readings of a new poem by Hill the reader’s ear is cocked.