Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
    everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
    inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
        -Geoffrey Hill, De Jure Belli ac Pacis

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 a poem, most of which I didn't understand, DE JURE BELLI AC PACIS, which is written in memory of Hans-Bernd von Haeften, who plotted against murder and was executed in 1944.  The first :

    Could none predict these haughty degradations
    as now your high-strung
                                martyred resistance serves
    to consecrate the liberties of Maastricht.

followed later by :

                            To the high-minded
    base-metal forgers of this common Europe,
    community of parody, you stand ec-
    centric as a prophet.

Even without being able to follow every elusive allusion in the poem, and without knowing anything of von Haeften, you can easily discern the message that Mr. Hill is contemptuous of the new European Union, based solely on economic integration, with no thought given to the unlikelihood of ever turning these disparate nations into a genuine community, and little regard given to the surrender of sovereignty and freedom it will require.

Even if you are unmoved by the specter of England subjugating itself to French and German bureaucrats and indifferent to the economism of modern British society, you may have trouble figuring out why Geoffrey Hill sounds so angry, so much at times like an Old Testament prophet.  But think on this quote from Cardinal Cormac Murphy-OíConnor :

    It does seem in our countries in Britain today, especially in England and Wales, that Christianity, as a sort of backdrop to peopleís lives
    and moral decisions ó and to the Government, the social life of the country ó has now almost been vanquished.

or this one from Dr. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury :

    A tacit atheism prevails. Death is assumed to be the end of life, bleak though that thought is. If we need hope to clutch to our breast at all
    it will be in such greatly scaled down forms, such as our longings for family happiness, the next holiday or personal fulfilment. Our
    concentration on the here and now renders thoughts of eternity irrelevant.

All of which brings us back to the Biblical Canaan, where the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and so were sold into slavery.  Simply as a literary matter, Geoffrey Hill's poems here are a powerful evocation of the idea that something similar is happening now to England and the British people, that they have become a post-Christian and demoralized society.  And if, like me, you agree with the specific charges he levels here, however oblique the terms in which he couches them, then you'll like the book very much and be honored to put some effort into reading it and wrestling with his meanings.

(Reviewed:03-Jan-02)

Grade: (A-) Orrin C. Judd

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