Canaan

Despite the extreme difficulty of these award-winning poems--difficulty for which Geoffrey Hill, considered by some to be England's greatest living poet, is notorious--I like them very much. And there I find myself hoist on my own petard, having frequently raged against the obscurantism of authors like James Joyce, but now endorsing a poet who is nearly as impenetrable at times. So, first, let me acknowledge that I am willing to forgive more from Mr. Hill because I favor his dark moral/religious/political take on modern England, than I would be from someone who was just being obscure for obscurity's sake, say Joyce or Pynchon. Second, I do think we, justifiably, tend to give poets more leeway than novelists; after all, by the very effort they have to put in to achieving a chiseled brevity they earn some right to ask a little more effort of us readers. The nearly forty poems here do not fill even eighty pages, so if you have to read them once or twice, or ten times, it doesn't seem as onerous a task as trudging through hundreds of densely printed pages of a novel.Mr. Hill's themes and methods are signaled early on, in the title of the collection and in the epigraph : ...So ye children of Israel did wickedly in the sight of the Lord, & forgate the Lord their God, & serued Baalim, and Asheroth ... Yea, they offred their sonnes, and their daughters vnto diuels, And shed innocent blood, euen the blood of their soones, and of their daughters, whome they offred vnto the idols of Canaan, and the land they defiled with blood. Thus were they steined with their owne inuentions ... o Canaan, the land of the Philistims, I wil euen destroy thee without an inhabitant. Judges 3:7; Psalm 106: 37-9; Zephaniah 2:5 (from the Geneva Bible of 1560)The Geneva Bible of 1560? Okay, so he's delving back into the past, to a vibrant and impassioned form of ruggedly fundamentalist Protestantism and a Bible written by Brits in exile (note that Professor Hill himself is and has been at Boston University); comparing modern England to ancient Canaan, and casting himself in the role of doomsayer. The reader has been warned.Here's an example of one of the more accessible pieces : DARK-LAND Wherein Wesley stood up from his father's grave, summoned familiar dust for strange salvation: whereto England rous'd, ignorant, her inane Midas-like hunger: smoke engrossed, cloud-encumbered, a spectral people raking among the ash; its freedom a lost haul of entailed riches.I've no idea who Wesley and his father are, though I assume it's John Wesley (1703-91), the founder of Methodism, but can tell you that this bleak vision taps into three of Mr. Hill's favorite themes : of England as having become excessively materialistic, even hedonistic; of hard-won British liberty as a thing of the past; and of post-War Europe as an ash heap. That much I think I follow.Or consider just two of the images from

The sequence "De Jure Belli ac Pacis" ("of the laws of war and peace": the title of a work by Hugo Grotius) in this volume is one of the finest things Hill has written: an elegy which branches between the private and the public voice, accusing the "high-minded / base-metal forgers of this common Europe, / community of parody" at the same time as it laments the loss of what "[w]e might have kept" of the more humble, inhibited high-mindedness of the poem's dedicatee, Hans-Bernd von Haeften (a member of the Kreisau circle of conspirators against Hitler).The poem asks whether the "witness" of those who stood not only against Hitler but against the politics of Hitlerism ("wild reasons of the state", as Hill's poem on Bonhoeffer has it) is safe in Europe's keeping, when its tributes to the murdered conspirators "compound with Cicero's maxims, Schiller's chant" (Beethoven's Ode to Joy, presumably) the silencing of von Haeften's "silenced verities". More ominously, it speaks of the "new depths of invention" to which the Nazis sank in the torture and execution of members of the Kreisau circle, suggesting that the bestiality of the SS is another part of the disavowed inheritence of modern Europe. The interrogators played records of children singing folk music to drown out the screams of their captives; does not our culture also have recourse to "children's / songs to mask torture" (cf Benigni's _La Vita e' Bella_)?Not all of _Canaan_ is as good as this. Hill's "Psalms of Assize", for instance, read like marginalia on marginalia, simultaneously clenched and lyrical: the "singable remainder" of a calcinated theology, perhaps, but too brittle to last in the reader's imagination. But much of the volume is more than worth sticking with. The poems are more often than not about the disappearance of their own referents - "the names / and what they have about them dark to dark" ("Sobieski's Shield") - but this is the very opposite of a willed obscurity: Hill's language calls after lost things into the darkness into which they have fallen, and sometimes manages to recover "lost footage, / achieve too late prescient telegraphy" (another name for 20/20 hindsight?). Perhaps this marks Hill ineradicably as a grumpy old modernist: whilst other poets, other poetics, have devoted themselves to exploring and even celebrating the contingency of language and meaning, _Canaan_ remains anachronistically committed to an elegiac mode. But in fact its particular glory is that it shows what the elegy can be and go on being even amid a society and culture besotted with the evanescent and continually on the make, yet afflicted with a deep and inscrutable nostalgia for a loss it has little way of knowing how to confront.