Mark Scroggins Reviews Geoffrey Hill's 'Darkly Luminous Poetry'

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin commanded Geoffrey Hill's attention for the final years of his life. It appears posthumously now in a volume edited by Kenneth Haynes, which, in Scroggins's estimation, "caps an extraordinary career." 

By his early 50s, on the strength of a few slim volumes of formal, densely compacted verse, Hill was acclaimed by many as the greatest living English poet. His was a darkly luminous, even claustrophobic poetry, brooding over the horrors of European history and the difficulty of attaining moral probity in a world seemingly abandoned by God.

Then he took a position at Boston University, remarried, and found the right combination of medication to treat lifelong conditions of crippling anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Newfound equanimity resulted in a flood of work; he produced 15 collections over the last 20 years of his life, including 4 previously unpublished volumes gathered in his gigantic collection Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012.

Three of those volumes are in The Daybooks, six book-length sequences composed between 2007 and 2012. Presumably they’re “daybooks” because Hill worked on them daily, but The Book of Baruch is more diaristic than any of them: “This, it is becoming clear, is more a daybook than ever The Daybooks were,” he notes. Where The Daybooks are composed in various strict traditional forms, The Book of Baruchconsists of prose poems, with considerable internal rhyming, off-rhyming, and anagrammatic play: “textured” prose, one might call them. For his part, Hill called what he was writing a “cyclic pindaric ode.”

Read on at Hyperallergic.