Synopses & Reviews
The Lord sent the Children of Israel into Canaan, the enemy's country, to topple the idols worshiped there. Instead they settled among the heathen, forgot their Lord, and made themselves slaves to earthly pleasures. For Geoffrey Hill, England, indeed allthis common Europe has become a second Canaan, a land whose people have squandered their inheritance, betrayed their higher selves, and are daily stained with their own works, where Evil is not good's absence but gravity's/everlasting bedrock. Hill's passionate and resistant poetry renews the struggle to redeem that land.
Review
"Art of the highest lyric intensity . . . it stands with the work of Mandelstam and Montale." Boston Globe
"Among our finest poets, Geoffrey Hill is at present the most European - in his Latinity, in his dramatization of the Christian condition, in his political intensity." -- George Steiner
Synopsis
Here is public poetry of uncommon moral urgency: it bears witness to the sufferings of the innocent at the hands of history and to the martyrdom of those who have dared look history in the eye. "Rich, quarrelsome...handsome and brutish...Hill's poetry is the major achievement of late-twentieth-century verse," says The New Criterion. "Canaan is one of the few serious books we will have to mark the millennium."
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