Synopses & Reviews
Geoffrey Hill is a moralist, and his subject is pain - the pain inflicted by man upon man. Alone among contemporary poets, he dares to judge our record of violence against ourselves. And if he judges us all for our failings - for both our enormities and our cowardly responses to them - he judges himself just as fiercely. He prays for divine forgiveness, and for the grace that we need to begin to forgive ourselves. John Hollander has called Geoffrey Hill powerful, original, and profound -- the finest British poet of our time. The justice of this estimation is apparent in every page of The Triumph of Love, a masterpiece in the forgotten mode of laus et vituperatio, a protest against evil and a tribute to those who have the courage to resist it.
Review
"Art of the highest lyric intensity . . . it stands with the work of Mandelstam and Montale." Boston Globe
"Geoffrey Hill may be the strongest and most original English poet of the second half of our fading century . . . The range of variation and diction, rhetorical level, degree and function of wordplay and, along that great spectrum from solemn to funny that true seriousness inhabits, provides in itself a kind of dramaturgy." The Los Angeles Times
"Hill's poems serve exalted artistic ends . . . They display such burnish, such sensuality and coiled force, that by comparison most other verse looks pale, undernourished and unimportant." The Washington Post
"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
"Hill's poems demand and reward reading upon reading: the ascent is steep, the view austerely sublime." The Wall Street Journal
Synopsis
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