Toby Martinez de las Rivas's Terror Jousts With Geoffrey Hill's Manifold Anatomy of Guilt

"The first poet to rise to Geoffrey Hill's manifold challenges is Toby Martinez de las Rivas," writes Dai George for Boston Review. What might those be? How about guilt: "The reality of original sin—and the manifestation of sin in the slippery, transient, 'coercive' medium of language—haunts and animates Hill’s writing from first to last. We are imperfect creatures and our tongues betray us. Like a coltish horse trying to overthrow its rider, language 'is rebellious to one’s desire to make easy use of it.'"

Looking closely at Martinez de las Rivas’s Terror, which "baffled" the British poetry scene when it came out last year, means acknowledging Hill's influence: "ignoring it would be akin to ignoring feathers in an account of how birds fly." More:

...[As] you would expect from work so steeped in Hill’s thinking, it is not just nature that is presumed guilty in Terror, but language and self-expression itself. “To narrate is to relent,” declares the first line of “Blackdowns,” before adding a terse vow that more casual readers might regret: “in me there shall be no relenting.” Indeed, one way that Martinez de la Rivas departs from Hill is in the agony and drama of his battle with language. In Hill that battle can sometimes feel aloof and cynical, as if he knows full well the treachery of language, and so sets up in his poems staged skirmishes that prove the intractability of his thesis. Martinez de las Rivas, on the other hand, thrashes in the net of language, never content to let its “coercive force” obtain: “I fail the words or they fail me, but: I am not failed by.” This admirable sense of responsibility encompasses hope; language and its user are admitted to be at odds but the failure is not inevitable, as it would be in the passive construction the speaker eschews.

By now you can probably sense whether you have the stomach for this level of meta-poetic, meta-critical jousting with empirical guilt. Before dismissing (or embracing) Martinez de las Rivas as a rebarbative egghead, however, it is worth bearing in mind that he writes with searing passion about guilt, too: not the guilt we find etched into language, but the first half of Hill’s anatomy, the more colloquial guilt we experience when we do bad things. In “Woolbury,” the penitent speaker declares, “I am heartily sorry for my fault, my offence,” and we don’t assume that he’s talking about his wayward use of language. Even so, what this “fault” might amount to is left bewilderingly open-ended...

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