Same here, Mark.
On Mon, 8 Mar 2010 21:45:33 -0500, Mark Weiss
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>But like Milton a best-selling poet.
>
>I get Milton. I've never gotten Hill, not even the Mercian Hymns. I
>assume it's a lack in me.
>
>Mark
>
>At 07:41 PM 3/8/2010, you wrote:
>>I'd missed this at first Rob:
>>
>>On 8 March 2010 15:12, Robin Hamilton
>><<mailto:[log in to unmask]>robin.hamilton2@btintern
et.com> wrote:
>><<
>>its roots are in British society itself.
>> >>
>>
>>So how do you account for Geoffrey Hill then, sunny jim?
>>
>>Rob.
>>
>>
>>Hill is a major conservative poet of Imperial England without an
>>Empire to write about. The result is a poetic language that, at its
>>best, is largely constructed out of his reading, but obliquely
>>colliding with the modern world. I think his best work remains the
>>latter part of King Log, Mercian Hymns, and parts of Tenebrae:
>>there's something wrong in the relationship of poet and language in
>>the late books (he tries to be colloquial for a start!)
>>The poems are also like traps, as quite a few have observed, so the
>>celebrated sequence 'Funeral Music' is a kind of phyrric victory for
>>the poet, the reader would rather remain on the outside thank you
>>very much - it's a bit like Lowell's 'Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket'
>>in that respect.
>>Someone in a magazine I read recently compared him to Milton after
>>the Restoration: loathed by both sides equally.
>>
>>--
>>David Bircumshaw
>>"A window./Big enough to hold screams/
>>You say are poems" - DMeltzer
>>Website and A Chide's Alphabet
>><http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk>http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
>>The Animal Subsides
>><http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html>http://www.a
rrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
>>Facebook:
>><http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw>http://www.facebook.c
om/david.bircumshaw
>>twitter:
<http://twitter.com/bucketshave>http://twitter.com/bucketshave
>>blog:
<http://groggydays.blogspot.com/>http://groggydays.blogspot.com/
>
>Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University
>of California Press).
>http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
>
>"Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of
>Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so
>effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United
>States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in
>English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The
>Nation
>
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