The Triumph of Love Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Triumph of Love Book

The Triumph of Love is a swan song for our most violent and turbulent of centuries. Geoffrey Hill has a reputation as a difficult poet, and it's true that this volume is no easy read, but it's by no means inaccessible, either. Forming a book-length poem divided into 150 sections, its free verse is rich with allusions from Petrarch to the Scott expedition and dense with the weight of history and philosophy. Hill takes nothing less than suffering as his subject, and his poems aren't shy about staring evil straight in the face--in particular, the Holocaust, an evil compounded by our inability to distinguish one of its victims from the next: "this, and this, / the unique face, indistinguishable, this, these, choked in a cess-pit of leaking Sheol." If the subject matter is uniformly somber, the style is not. Fragmented, colloquial, often interrupted by editorial asides, parodies, and snatches of song, The Triumph of Love marks something of a departure from the stately formalism of Hill's earlier books. Through it all runs the self-interrogating, self-mocking voice of the poet, questioning his right to write about such matters as well as the language he uses to do so. In the end, however, Hill finds that the elegy itself is the only answer to the questions history poses. "What / Ought a poem to be?" he asks himself, and answers (three times), "a sad and angry consolation." Widely recognized as one of Britain's distinguished poets, here Hill has produced a memorably sad and angry consolation for "a nation / with so many memorials but no memory."Read More

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  • Product Description

    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.

  • 0395912350
  • 9780395912355
  • HILL
  • 25 June 1999
  • Houghton Mifflin (Trade)
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 82
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