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Rating: 
Summary: challenging reading; not for the timid
Review: Geoffrey Hill is among the best three or four British poets of his generation. His poems are challenging: they require a strong knowledge of history, religion, and literary allusions, as well as the decipherment of thorny syntax and obscure symbolism. But to interpret these traits as weaknesses would be mistaken. One can continue to read verse in the colloquial, Blake/Wordsworth/Frost/Williams tradition ... or one can tackle poetry which requires real effort to understand it. Hill offers the latter.
Rating:
Summary: challenging reading; not for the timid
Review: Geoffrey Hill is among the best three or four British poets of his generation. His poems are challenging: they require a strong knowledge of history, religion, and literary allusions, as well as the decipherment of thorny syntax and obscure symbolism. But to interpret these traits as weaknesses would be mistaken. One can continue to read verse in the colloquial, Blake/Wordsworth/Frost/Williams tradition ... or one can tackle poetry which requires real effort to understand it. Hill offers the latter.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent collection that will take some digestion
Review: Here, collected in one volume, are Geoffrey Hill's first five books of poetry (For the Unfallen, King Log, Mercian Hymns, Tenebrae, and the Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy), plus a few early versions of poems that later appeared in Canaan. For those who are not yet familiar with Hill's works, this would be the obvious place to start, since his last two works (Speech! Speech!, and The Triumph of Love) are both difficult book length poems, and "Canaan" is not necessarily any easier.Not that these poems are easy, not even the ones Hill wrote when he was 19 (like "Genesis", the opening poem of the collection). What they are is challenging, beautiful, thoughtful, at times meditative, at times lyrical, often skeptical, almost always wonderful. These are poems written for those who love poetry and don't mind if it's hard, who can reread a poem ten times in order to appreciate it, who have the patience to learn to read a real poet. Although this book is only 200+ pages, there is a lifetime (almost!) of reflection contained within it, from the early poems reflecting on art, responsibility, history and war in "For the Unfallen", to the funeral music of "King Log", the beautiful prose poems of "Mercian Hymns", and the deeply religious "Tenebrae". Give it some time. Don't judge it too quickly. Hill will certainly be remembered as one of the greatest poets of the 20th and early 21st centuries, as one who recognized the heavy responsibility of a poet in our times.
Rating:
Summary: A nobbled vernacular?
Review: Or a nobbly vernacular? Perhaps a knackered vernacular. Hill's poetry speaks a language not far removed from the ordinary, right up against it even: "not strangeness, but strange likeness". Uncommonly strange. "Simple, sensuous and direct": a likely story. For "direct" read "dialect", in a poor comedian's travesty of a Chinese accent. But this is poetry that goes to the roots, by one route or another, like an underground map of the English language. There is - believe me - nothing abstract or effete about it (laughter). What you have to know to read it is how to go on reading even when you don't know what you have to know. Now go and read it. 0 out of n readers found this review helpful.
Rating:
Summary: A nobbled vernacular?
Review: Or a nobbly vernacular? Perhaps a knackered vernacular. Hill's poetry speaks a language not far removed from the ordinary, right up against it even: "not strangeness, but strange likeness". Uncommonly strange. "Simple, sensuous and direct": a likely story. For "direct" read "dialect", in a poor comedian's travesty of a Chinese accent. But this is poetry that goes to the roots, by one route or another, like an underground map of the English language. There is - believe me - nothing abstract or effete about it (laughter). What you have to know to read it is how to go on reading even when you don't know what you have to know. Now go and read it. 0 out of n readers found this review helpful.
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