> You will have to convince me that it is worth ordering. I dont think I
> bought his last one. And the recent one I did read was distinctly not for
> me.

The one you missed was "The Orchards of Syon", a somewhat calmer
affair than "Speech! Speech!". I liked "Speech! Speech!" better, but I
appear to be in a minority there.

"Scenes from Comus" is witty and sad, and has some great
one-or-two-liners. I fell for:

                                  The soi-disant
harmless eccentric. Nobody's harmless.
Neither is comedy. Maybe the polka
injured thousands.

Later, he says, "The gadgetry of nice / determinism makes, breaks,
comedians". The allusion I think is to Bergson's theory of comedy, in
which the sudden disruption of an orderly process (dancing the polka,
walking down the street) creates hilarity and, possibly, injury.
Poetic timing for Hill is comic timing, which is to say | the breaking
and resetting of metre, with or without the aid of funny | looking
diacritic marks.

I also liked this, which I take (without being asked) to be about the
fabled Forest of Nead:

                                            What
a weirdo, you think. Well, yes, I was wired weird.
Back to the forest, then, where still so much
is the matter of legend. I see us getting down
to something long since hallowed and nuptial,
nuptial or nothing, angrily desired.

Because I spent a long time studying Hill, and let my own imaginative
concerns be formed or deformed somewhat in the process, I tend now to
find that he's writing about things I care about and - eerily enough -
have written about myself, without knowing in advance what he was
going to say. It's therefore reassuring for me also to encounter in
these poems a Hill who is quite incomprehensibly odd, even to one of
his better-informed (though I say so myself) admirers. There is also a
certain amount of this sort of thing:

This is a fabled England, vivid
in winter bareness; bleakly comforting,
the faded orchard's hover of grey-green.

Lovely as it is, it doesn't move anything in me - whereas parts of
"Speech! Speech!" felt like having all of the little cats from under
the Cat in the Hat's hat running around disarranging one's mental
furniture. Some people think Hill's at his best doing "natural
scenery" (kind of a contradiction in terms, which is maybe the point).
It's clear that his heart is in it, and I do know something of the
country he's talking about (I grew up in Herefordshire and have lived
in Shropshire - quite near to Ludlow in fact - and often passed
through Bromsgrove on the train from Birmingham to visit my parents),
but unlike Hill I don't appear ever to have developed "blinding
theologies of flowers and fruits".

I think "Scenes from Comus" is at least as good as "The Triumph of
Love", although less of a radical break with its precursors (it's
close in tone to "The Orchards of Syon"). I do need now to go and
brush up on my Milton - and, by the looks of things, my Leibniz as
well ("the man who said this died of alchemy").

Dominic
--
// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov