The Triumph of Love Book

Geoffrey Hill is a moralist, and his subject is pain--the pain is inflicted by man upon man. Alone among contemporary poets, he dares to judge our record of violence against ourselves. And if he judges us all for our failings--for both our enormities and our cowardly responses to them--he judges himself just as fiercely, and forgives himself even more grudgingly.

In his new poem, his most direct and personal to date, Hill writes about his own "slow haul to forgive" the history of this sordid century. As in his earlier work, he decries the atrocities of war, the corruption of the church, and the misrule of the modern world. But there is much here that will surprise his longtime readers: a Hill more candid than ever before, more willing to rage in his own voice, more savagely humorous about himself, his art, and his role as a public poet. As Craig Raine has written about Hill, "Even when the poetry is difficult, obscure, or painful for us to read, we know it is doing us good. Hill makes no concessions to our intellectual or moral self-esteem." Or, in this extraordinary poem, even to his own.