Synopses & Reviews
A collection of new essays on the remarkable work produced by the poet Geoffrey Hill since the mid-1990s. Hill is widely recognised as the finest living English poet and the quality of his recent publications has been matched by the pace at which he produces quantities of profound and startlingly original verse. This book brings together work on Hill by figures as diverse as Rowan Williams and Christopher Ricks, along with penetrating treatments of these late writings by younger scholars, in order to provide a series of fresh perspectives on some of the finest and most challenging poetry now being written. It explores topics including physicality, death, confession, and recusancy, and also contains a large-scale bibliography of Hill's writings, which will be invaluable to all those seeking to read more widely in the work of this fascinating and exceptional figure.
Review
"Including a detailed bibliography of Hill's publications, this volume contributes a valuable overview of Hill's career...Highly recommended." --Choice
About the Author
John Lyon is Reader in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and has published widely on Shakespeare and the early modern period, as well as on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and poetry. He has edited works by Kipling, Henry James, and Conrad for Penguin and OUP World's Classics, and is currently editing a volume of the Edinburgh edition of R.L. Stevenson.
Peter McDonald is a poet and critic, whose Collected Poems appear from Carcanet Press in 2012. He has published four volumes of criticism, and is currently editing for Longman the Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats. Since 1999, he has been Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ church, Oxford.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction, John Lyon and Peter McDonald
Hill's Unrelenting, Unreconciling Mind, Christopher Ricks
Recusant Hill, Brian Cummings
Geoffrey Hill's Quartet, Rowan Williams
On Being 'A Man of the World': Geoffrey Hill and Physicality, Sophie Ratcliffe
The Impossibility of Death, Jeffrey Wainwright
Geoffrey Hill's Eye Troubles, John Lyon
Geoffrey Hill and Confession, Kathryn Murphy
'But to my Task': Work, Truth, and Metre in Later Hill, Peter McDonald
A Bibliography of Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Haynes