The Triumph of Love

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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."


From Publishers Weekly
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.


From Library Journal
Hill has long enjoyed a quiet reputation as one of the most brilliant living poets in English, and certain poems from earlier collections looked like the signposts of a great career. But since the 1970s Hill's poetry has carried the increasingly rebarbative tone of The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1985. o.p.) and Canaan (Houghton, 1997), retreating into an ardent Anglicanism that almost entirely renounces salvation. The stance he adopts here is that of an angry prophet, hectoring and humorless. Contemplating his life and the century's from the point where the "terrible Angel of Procreation" begins to give place to "the Angel-in-hiding of Senility," Hill rages at our failure in "the whole-keeping of Augustine's City of God"; his only solace is a faith defined as "inescapable endurance." Despite Hill's erudition, not many readers will respond to this switchbacking journey through hundreds of learned allusions. For larger collections.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Langdon Hammer
...a book-length meditation on "the fire-targeted century" now ending, an elegy for everyone who has burned.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, John Hollander
Geoffrey Hill may be the strongest and most original English poet of the second half of our fading century, although his work is by no means either easy or very popular. Dense, intricate, exceedingly compact, his poetry has always had great visionary force...


Review
"Hill, always the heir of William Blake and D. H. Lawrence, more than confirms his calling as poet-prophet in The Triumph of Love. The poem is a great and difficult moral, cognitive, and aesthetic achievement -- 'a sad and angry consolation' almost beyond measure." -- Harold Bloom


Review
"Hill's poems demand and reward reading upon reading: the ascent is steep, the view austerely sublime."


Review
"Hill's poems demand and reward reading upon reading: the ascent is steep, the view austerely sublime."


Book Description
In Geoffrey Hill's words, "The poet's job is to define and yet again define. If the poet doesn't make certain horrors appear horrible, who will?" This astonishing book is a protest against evil and a tribute to those who have had the courage to resist it.


About the Author
Geofrey Hill was born in 1932, in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. He is the author of five books of poetry, two volumes of literary criticism, and a stage version of Isben's poetic drama Brand. He teaches in the University Professors Program at Boston University. He currently resides in Brookline, Massachusetts


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...[U]nusually capacious in its historical and spatial scope....[The poet adopts] a wide range of tones, from the savagely stately..to the petulant and even squalid....Little escapes his scorn...journalism or the entertainment industry or high finance or the unworthy among his poetic rivals or, most laceratingly, himself. — The New CriterionRead all 7 "From The Critics" >


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