The Triumph of Love [Paperback]

The Triumph of Love is a swan song for our most violent and turbulent of centuries. Geoffrey Hill has a reputation as a difficult poet, and it's true that this volume is no easy read, but it's by no means inaccessible, either. Forming a book-length poem divided into 150 sections, its free verse is rich with allusions from Petrarch to the Scott expedition and dense with the weight of history and philosophy. Hill takes nothing less than suffering as his subject, and his poems aren't shy about staring evil straight in the face--in particular, the Holocaust, an evil compounded by our inability to distinguish one of its victims from the next: "this, and this, / the unique face, indistinguishable, this, these, choked in a cess-pit of leaking Sheol." If the subject matter is uniformly somber, the style is not. Fragmented, colloquial, often interrupted by editorial asides, parodies, and snatches of song, The Triumph of Love marks something of a departure from the stately formalism of Hill's earlier books. Through it all runs the self-interrogating, self-mocking voice of the poet, questioning his right to write about such matters as well as the language he uses to do so. In the end, however, Hill finds that the elegy itself is the only answer to the questions history poses. "What / Ought a poem to be?" he asks himself, and answers (three times), "a sad and angry consolation." Widely recognized as one of Britain's distinguished poets, here Hill has produced a memorably sad and angry consolation for "a nation / with so many memorials but no memory." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Unexpectedly soon after last year's searing Canaan comes Hill's latest indictment of Western Culture, once again obsessively examining the pockmarked, exhausted corpse of "Europa." A single poem of 150 stanzas, The Triumph of Love uncharacteristically reads as if it had been written in non-stop, Kerouac-style sessions, though Hill's signature densely wrought, freighted lines remain. Here, Hill's preoccupations are Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, the apocalyptic fire-bombings of cities in Britain and Germany and the shoah, invoked by reference to The Book of Daniel, the work of Callot and intimations of its horrors that seemingly came to the poet in boyhood. In grappling with the question of redemption for the murdered, Hill finds himself questioning?in "livid" self-examinations addressing a career's worth of criticism?the didactic mode he has previously used to such great effect. With the same granite-cut allusions and morally outraged rants that have incurred charges of turgid iconoclasm, Hill defiantly clings to his chosen mode ("I offer to the presiding judge of our art, self-pleasured Ironia"), even as he sputters in not-quite-mock self-justification. Summoning poetic heroes from Milton to Eugenio Montale, Hill finally tries out the possibilities of praise ("Lauda? Lauda? Lauda Sion? LAUDA!") only to turn and undercut them: "Incantation of incontinence?the lyric cry?/ Believe me, he's not/ told you the half of it. (All who are able may stand.)" Despite the tongue-in-cheek invitation, the reader who has followed Hill's heroic efforts to answer to history may be tempted to stand in admiration anyway.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.