April Warman reviews Without Title by Geoffrey Hill

The back cover of Without Title quotes the Daily Telegraph’s praise for Geoffrey Hill’s recent work: ‘Trumpets should be blown, garlands made … he has never been more loquacious, playful, wildly comic or poignant. His greatness is as certain as that of the poets he invokes.’ It seems, then, that the critical incomprehension and/or distaste, with which Hill’s later work was initially greeted, is lifting.

But I’m not sure that this new mood of embrace and acceptance, this celebration of his ability to appear as human as the next person, is any more realistic in the version of Hill it proffers. There is always a temptation when approaching the notoriously difficult Hill to pick out the bits that seem to mean something, and hope that the rest is as missable as it is (at first sight) opaque. His late work’s introduction of a (loquacious, playful, comic, poignant) persona, who seems more or less identifiable with the poet himself, has heightened this temptation: the immediate gratification of, for example, finding the magisterial Hill appearing to address us confidingly, admitting to his own self-indulgences (as in the tenth of the ‘Pindarics: after Cesare Pavese’ that make up the middle section of this book: ‘It feels good / raising the question that can sound at once / heroic and perplexed’) can disincline us to deal with the intractable, less dramatised material that surrounds it (the tenth pindaric ends inscrutably: ‘Can’t go further / unless to claim I found such plenitude / one of the dark moon’s non-existent seas.’) When the reader feels continually wrong-footed by the poetry’s cramped, disjointed syntax, and sudden swerves into new, and apparently unrelated, subject matter, the temptation to read for the plain-speaking, humanised moments is strong.

It is not always wrong. ‘The Jumping Boy’ is, I think, likely to become one of the most popular poems from Without Title, precisely because of its consistent simplicity. In its grave appreciation of the self-sufficient absorption of childhood (‘He leaps because he has serious / joy in leaping’), in its playfulness ( the image, and the enjambement, of ‘Hermes’ winged / plimsolls’), its sedate comedy (the naïve tone present in ‘This may be levitation. I / could do that’), its poignancy (the wistful certainties of memory: ‘the tall house, its blind / gable end, the trees – I know this place’), it is hugely attractive. It ends, perhaps unprecedentedly for Hill, in what can only be called affirmation: ‘Jump away, jumping boy; the boy I was / shouts go.’ This is a feel-good poem, and a good one.

But it is an exception. Much of the volume gives little away, and meaning has to be worked hard for, unaided by the prompts of a recognisable ‘voice’. The total absence of such a voice can, in fact, be all to the good: the twentieth pindaric, taking its cue from Pavese’s comment, ‘But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever’, returns to a perennial theme of Hill’s, and treats it with impressive, exemplary gravity and unself-consciousness. A characteristic play on syntax is deployed to present co-existent, yet incompatible, versions of how the significance of human suffering can be understood: the last lines of the first two sections differ only (but entirely) by a comma: ‘Other than the story this tells[,] nothing’. But much of the book remains, on first sight at least, simply obscure – whether or not the further, closer attention that it will inevitably draw will reveal hidden richness, remains to be seen.

At times, however, Hill’s ‘difficulty’ and his ‘humanity’ can seem not mutually exclusive, but mutually enhancing. Without Title excites me most in a short sequence, ‘In the Valley of the Arrow’, which, like ‘The Jumping Boy’, coheres through its speaker, but which lacks the earlier poem’s potential cosiness, because this voice is not one with which it is easy to identify; its disconcerting turns of mood, its insistence on canvassing disturbing subject matter, render discomfiting even the impulse to identify it with the respected figure of the poet.

The sequence begins in a posture very familiar as late Hill: ‘artificial’, ‘concocted’ ‘first flowers’ are deprecated, with pointed enjambement: ‘Crocus for starters soon looks pretty / much washed out.’ (It is worth noting that an early, uncollected poem of Hill’s is called ‘I see the crocus armies spread…’.) Set up for praise against such mannered invention is the crude energy of the gorse, ‘bristling with static’, an ‘inclement challenge’, a ‘spicy orator’. Parallels with the poet’s career and late self-positioning are clear.

The second and third poems enact a similarly familiar procedure, a brusque, ironic self-undermining. Set on facing pages, each poem ends with a single, italicised line. The second poem’s superb landscape evocation (‘the singing iron footbridges, tight weirs / pebble-dashed with bright water’ – another classic feature of late Hill) reaches its climax with the high cultural and spiritual claims of the phrase ‘beata l’alma’. Opposite, concluding a far bumpier, less forthcoming poem (‘Dying’s no let-up, an atrocious / means of existence’) stands the comment, ‘Smug bastard’.

This much is unsurprising to a follower of Hill’s career so far. The insistence on the realities and privations of decrepitude (which continues into the fourth poem: ‘Heart-stab memento giving a side-glimpse / of feared eternity’) is not comfortable, but nor is it deniable. We could all come to this. But the fifth and last poem goes further. Critics have for some time been airily pointing out Hill’s preoccupation with ‘the persistence … of desire into old age’ (Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian); the fifth poem ends in a scenario that savages the decorum implicit in the prim designation ‘desire’:

Unzipped and found addressing the smeared walls
of an underpass, crying not mý
address, no more unnamed accusers,

self-dubbed natural thespian enacts
age, incapacity – judge the witnesses –
brings himself off to video’d provocation.

Pardon my breathing.

In its uncompromising unpleasantness, this is truly difficult stuff. It is the culmination of a progression of stances, all of which, up to this moment, have been identifiable with Hill. Its positioning invites us to assimilate this further aspect to our conception of the writer, but the crudity, and especially the unflinching joylessness, of the depiction of ageing sexuality makes such assimilation extremely unsettling. In this sequence, Hill tests the limits of our desire to discover the person behind the poem, to connect with another human being through verse. Human beings are not just loquacious, playful, comic or poignant. How much humanity can we take?

Without Title (Penguin, 2006) 96 pp, £9.99, ISBN 0141020253

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.