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the complete review - poetry

Canaan

by
Geoffrey Hill

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : demanding and intense political and religious poetry

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(T)he stark spareness and fragmented brevity of these poems leads one to wonder if substantial parts of them did not get lost on the way to the publisher." - Peter Firchow, World Literature Today
  
  
• "(A) volume of dazzling coherence and cumulative effect." - Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "This is, then, a volume with an unusually coherent vision, one which informs each of its parts. It is also, though, very hard going. (...) The architecture and intelligence of this book are admirable, but too often the individual poems are close to unintelligibility." - Lachlan Mackinnon, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       A quarter of these poems will be familiar to the readers of Hill's New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992, but that should not deter you. Hill has taken the baker's dozen included in that collection and placed them in a better setting in this cohesive and separate volume.
       These are largely political poems, presented in Hill's familiar though difficult style. To emphasize the unity of the collection a number of the poems share certain of the titles. Several are titled Mysticism and Democracy, and a number (including, tellingly, the first and the last) are titled To the High Court of Parliament. Three are titled Dark-land, two Parentalia -- all of which give clues as to Hill's interests and objectives here.
       These are English poems -- British in origin and concerned with British politics -- but Hill is poet enough to easily transcend these nominal concerns. The poems themselves, though often dealing with specific grievances, do soar beyond them. They are also angry and sad poems, with Hill seemingly seething on occasion. Hill's god (or, at any rate, the religion he turns to) seems anachronistic in our age, but he is a true poet which allows him to get away with it.
       Hill is, as always, a demanding read, and the darkness and anger of his poetry (carefully restrained, but always near boiling over) can be off-putting. We do recommend this collection -- it does contain some stunning poetry -- but we warn readers that it is not necessarily readily accessible. The poems are not especially long, but they are very dense and demanding.

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Links:

• Mariner Books publicity page

• Boston Review
• BrothersJudd.com
• Publishers Weekly

• The complete review's Geoffrey Hill page.
• Geoffrey Hill at the Poetry Foundation
• Profile in The Guardian

• The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin
• For the Unfallen
• King Log
• Mercian Hymns
• The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy
• New and Collected Poems
• The Orchards of Syon
• Speech ! Speech !
• Style and Faith
• Tenebrae
• A Treatise of Civil Power
• The Triumph of Love
• Without Title

• See also the index of Poetry under review

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About the Author:

       English poet Geoffrey Hill lived 1932 to 2016. A graduate of Keble College, Oxford, he has taught at the University of Leeds, at Cambridge, and at Boston University.

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