Volume 46, Number 9 · May 20, 1999
Lover of Lost Causes
By Denis Donoghue
Canaan
by Geoffrey Hill
Mariner, 76 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Triumph of Love
by Geoffrey Hill
Houghton Mifflin, 82 pp., $22.00
Geoffrey Hill was born in Bromsgrove, a small market town in Worcestershire, on June 18, 1932. 'If you stood at the top of the field opposite our house,' he has recalled, 'you looked right across the Severn Valley to the Clee Hills and the Welsh hills very faint and far off behind them.'[1] The vista may have been splendid, but the house cannot have been grand: his father was a police constable. On his mother's side, he is descended from artisans in the cottage industry of nail-making: his grandmother suffered a disfiguring accident that Hill refers to in a prose poem in Mercian Hymns (1971): 'It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge,' another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.'[2]
Review, 4324 words
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