A phoenix rising from European ashes
It is impossible in a short space to convey not merely how good, but how important Geoffrey Hill's writing is. In his mystic journey to the Goldengrove of his Worcestershire childhood this latter-day Blakean reopens problems which philosophy had long ago abandoned as intractable and which politics in its corruption had discarded. If I had to put it in a phrase, it would be: what we all lost when we lost our religion, and, at the same time, became deaf to the voices of our ancestors, their literature, their lives and thought-processes. But one can't put it in a phrase, and that is the point. Here comes our poet-sage 'to bring recollection found, weeping with rage'. There is no one alive writing in our language about deeper or more important matters, no one saying such interesting things.