Tenebrae Pa

Tenebrae is Geoffrey Hill's fourth volume of poetry, after his debut "For the Unfallen", "King Log" (which received praise especially for its sequence "Funeral Music"), and the much-acclaimed "Mercian Hymns" - a book of thirty prose poems. After the expansiveness of "Mercian Hymns", Hill returns to tight forms and religious themes in Tenebrae with astonishing results. The opening poem, "The Pentecost Castle", picks up Spanish love poetry to fabricate a beautiful, yet painful, music. Pain is not absent from the sonnet sequence "Lachrimae" either; it is there in the address to the "Crucified Lord" who swims endlessly on his cross without moving.Tenebrae has been criticized for being "too perfect" in its formal structures. This has an element of truth in it; there is something tortured, and tortuous, about its beauty; it is at times a finely tuned instrument of pain. Perhaps this is why these poems will strike a chord in many who have felt the agony of love and faith and faithlessness.