I haven't read 'De Jure Belli ac Pacis', Dom - I did *hear* Hill read it at
the Royal Festival Hall shortly after the book came out and I thought, I
know there's a lot wrong with the EU, but is he seriously comparing it to
Hitler? That's what put me off getting the book. It's easy to arouse our
indignation against the most evil regime the world has ever known, but what
exactly is his grudge against the *new* Europe? And how can he justify
making a connection between the two? Your review doesn't make clear.
Best wishes
Matthew
-----Original Message-----
From: domfox <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 14 August 2000 16:47
Subject: Review of Geoffrey Hill's "Canaan" submitted to Amazon.com
>The After-Life of the Elegy
>
>The sequence "De Jure Belli ac Pacis" ("of the laws of war and peace": the
>title of a work by Hugo Grotius) in this volume is one of the finest things
>Hill has written: an elegy which branches between the private and the
>public voice, accusing the "high-minded / base-metal forgers of this common
>Europe, / community of parody" at the same time as it laments the loss of
>what "[w]e might have kept" of the more humble, inhibited high-mindedness
>of the poem's dedicatee, Hans-Bernd von Haeften (a member of the Kreisau
>circle of conspirators against Hitler).
>
>The poem asks whether the "witness" of those who stood not only against
>Hitler but against the politics of Hitlerism ("wild reasons of the state",
>as Hill's poem on Bonhoeffer has it) is safe in Europe's keeping, when its
>tributes to the murdered conspirators "compound with Cicero's maxims,
>Schiller's chant" (Beethoven's Ode to Joy, presumably) the silencing of von
>Haeften's "silenced verities". More ominously, it speaks of the "new depths
>of invention" to which the Nazis sank in the torture and execution of
>members of the Kreisau circle, suggesting that the bestiality of the SS is
>another part of the disavowed inheritence of modern Europe. The
>interrogators played records of children singing folk music to drown out
>the screams of their captives; does not our culture also have recourse
>to "children's / songs to mask torture" (cf Benigni's _La Vita e' Bella_)?
>
>Not all of _Canaan_ is as good as this. Hill's "Psalms of Assize", for
>instance, read like marginalia on marginalia, simultaneously clenched and
>lyrical: the "singable remainder" of a calcinated theology, perhaps, but
>too brittle to last in the reader's imagination. But much of the volume is
>more than worth sticking with. The poems are more often than not about the
>disappearance of their own referents - "the names / and what they have
>about them dark to dark" ("Sobieski's Shield") - but this is the very
>opposite of a willed obscurity: Hill's language calls after lost things
>into the darkness into which they have fallen, and sometimes manages to
>recover "lost footage, / achieve too late prescient telegraphy" (another
>name for 20/20 hindsight?). Perhaps this marks Hill ineradicably as a
>grumpy old modernist: whilst other poets, other poetics, have devoted
>themselves to exploring and even celebrating the contingency of language
>and meaning, _Canaan_ remains anachronistically committed to an elegiac
>mode. But in fact its particular glory is that it shows what the elegy can
>be and go on being even amid a society and culture besotted with the
>evanescent and continually on the make, yet afflicted with a deep and
>inscrutable nostalgia for a loss it has little way of knowing how to
>confront.
>
>
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