AB Jackson reviews A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill

Let me nail my enthusiasms to the mast: if I were allowed only two books of poetry on the proverbial desert island, I would take the collected poems of Wallace Stevens and Geoffrey Hill; and by the latter, I'm referring to the collected Hill as published by Penguin in 1985 and which represented thirty years’ work over a modest 200 pages. Here is a sample:

Primroses; salutations; the miry skull
of a half-eaten ram; viscous wounds in earth
opening. What seraphs are afoot.

These opening lines of ‘A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook’ are typical of his style: a dark sense of drama (historical or religious), the attention to natural beauty and decay, and an absolute mastery of the poetic line.

The poems were famously difficult, nonetheless. In the late 60s, an editor commented: “I understand ‘Annunciations’ only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversation (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I cannot construe it.” A Scottish writer recently admitted: “I’ve seldom reached the end of a Hill poem without wanting to throw the book at the wall … that’s if I manage to reach the end.”

For me, it was this very difficulty or mystery which lay at the heart of Hill’s appeal, and I found Stevens mysterious and difficult and appealing in the same way. Here is the first section of Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’:

Requite this angel whose
flushed and thirsting face
stoops to the sacrifice
out of which it arose.
This is the lord Eros
of grief who pities
no one; it is
Lazarus with his sores.

I find this mesmerizing and subtly provocative. The quiet rhymes are near-anagrams of each other (arose, Eros, sores). Whatever is signified by the paradoxical and pitiless figure of “the lord Eros of grief” or his relationship to Lazarus I cannot guess, and yet the lines contain a suggestive quality which make them entirely understandable in a dog-eared fashion. The imagination is happiest when set to work.

Having said all this, I must now make another admission: my response to Hill’s books published after the 1985 Collected is very similar to the Scottish writer’s quoted above. For reasons I won’t outline here, his poems have become difficult in such a different way that I now approach them with a glazed foreboding rather than pleasure. The output has also increased: seven books published in the past ten years, compared to the five published in the previous thirty-seven.

The final lines in A Treatise of Civil Power (from ‘Nachwort’) are as follows:

– Urge to unmake
all wrought finalities, become a blabber
in the crowd’s face –

It is tempting to read this as Hill’s own summary of the ‘old’ (pre-1985) and the ‘new’ (post-1996) work: the former, intensely crafted and locked-down; the latter, more expansive and somehow ruder, with ‘rude’ emcompassing ‘unwrought’, ‘vigorous’, and ‘ill-mannered’. Whatever Hill was, he was never a ‘blabber’. He is not one now, of course, but the word is meaningful in terms of how Hill views his creative approach.

The poems are now shot through with Hill’s own commentaries and annotations, which might be seen as an attempt at transparency and openness – or, in Hill’s phrase, “this abdication / of self-censure” – if the results weren’t so opaque. Such comments read like interference: the work is no longer operating on a single frequency or in a steady tone. Imagine the fussy Polonius continually interrupting Hamlet in mid-speech with asides to the audience. Two examples:

                                           he could
contradict and contain multitudes (I’ve
cribbed Whitman, you stickler – short of a phrase)

                                          (When I said
grand minimalist I’d someone else in mind –
just to avoid confusion on that score)

One is tempted to reply – and perhaps this temptation is itself an upshot of Hill’s in-your-face strategy – “Well thanks for that,” in a rather irritated way.

The following lines (from ‘On Reading Milton and the English Revolution’) seem also to be a self-commentary on his recent style:

wrinching and spraining the text for clown-comedy
amid the pain.
    
The poems in Treatise are not as wrinched (wrenched, twisted) as they are in the 2000 volume Speech! Speech!, nor as cramped with painful clown-comedy, but they are often as difficult to enjoy:

Could so have managed not to be flinging
down this challenge.
True way is homeless but the better gods
go with the house. Cogito a bare
threshold, as G. Marcel sagely declares,
of what’s valid.
Come round to the idea, even so
belated, and knock.

Perhaps enjoyment is not the point, here, but rather a ‘coming round’ to whatever idea Hill has in mind. After we have been suitably stunned by the knotted verse, no doubt. The book’s central themes of power, justice and civil harmony are expanded upon (or rather contracted) in crossword-clue fashion:

                                 Non-concurrent
the freedom and constraint outside of this
transient lock that is itself both
end and motive.

Whether it’s UNIX command language or late Hill, it requires an uncommon kind of mind or temperament to take meaning from such coded structures. The political nature and civil purpose of language is of central concern throughout this book, as it has been in his previous work: “language is a part-broken league”; “I did what people do when words fail them”.

Glimmers and flashes of the ‘old’ Hill are still mercifully present. From ‘On Reading Milton..’ again:

God himself is our Zion where all creatures
are fellow citizens: the ox with the butterfly,
the butchers in meaty aprons, Aaron’s jewels,
a Commonwealth shilling from an oddments box;
great contrariety of mind; old reprobates
stuck with new-risen saints. Now cry Amen.

It is difficult to explain why I find this beautiful. Perhaps I sense an emotional engagement in the words (that fond and familiar “oddments box”, the glint of “Aaron’s jewels” – whatever they might be), and not just an unspooling of foreign intelligence. There’s a sense of body, of solid objects.

On occasion, Hill can produce lines of heart-breaking vulnerability:

I fear to wander in unbroken darkness
even with those I love. I know that sounds
a damn-fool thing to say.

If he was only partly successful in his wish to be “out of this hire-house of ceaseless allusion” and, Austin Powers-like, reclaimed his “lyric mojo” from the past, I would value the new work as much as the old. Read the Penguin Collected Poems for a better sense of this astounding poet.

A Treatise of Civil Power, Penguin, £9.99, 014103226X

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.