 |
 |
As I've never seen Hill read before, I have no authority from my own experience to declare that he has "mellowed", or is more "laid back" than he used to be. Nevertheless, from others' accounts of a burly, clenched figure declaiming through gritted teeth, I had come to imagine that hearing him read might be somewhat like enduring an assault, or perhaps a deserved chastisement (run with it, Erminia). The sober clowning that the "late" Hill goes in for is something else. Between poems he stood and drank slowly a glass of water with all the absurd dignity of a music hall pro. He was at his funniest apologising for the lameness of his own jokes, or for the lameness of the explanations he was sometimes kind enough to provide for them. These included limp gags about impotence (in one of the sections of his newest poem, "The Orchards of Zion", yet unpublished) and repeated reassurances that there were only "another twenty-five or so of these things" to get through. At other times he was acheingly terse: explaining that "the two Bonhoeffers, von Moltke, von Haeften" were members of the _Wiederstand_, the German - Christian - resistance to Hitler, he added simply that "they all died". He read "the lady Di sections" from _Speech! Speech!_, and was at pains to point out that they were written in a spirit of admiration rather than satire. I think that a particular virtue of one or two of those poems is that they make it possible for me to understand how he can possibly feel that way. He opposed hype and sentiment not with ridicule but with genuine praise, praise tinged with sadness and anger. I think it worked. The new poem consists of seventy-two sections of twenty-four lines, arranged rather like Miltonic canzoni (Hill said; or at least I think that's what he said). It contains - I can only be vague here - rather a lot of descriptions of landscape and weather. Very beautiful descriptions, it must be said. I thought they reprised the mood and mode of some of the poems from _Canaan_ which combined an awe-struck naturalism with an ironic metaphysics. I look forward to seeing them in print. - Dom