BOOKS
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From this complex negotIatIOn, occurring between writer and
"'stubborn language" as well as between writer and "political and
economic realities of circumstance," individual style emerges: namely, in
the transactions Hill thematizes in
The Enemy's Country,
whereby in
"relat[ing] otium to negotium" one "obtain[s], amid the world's
circumstances, that 'vacation from other busines,' the 'intervalls and ease'
in which to think and write." Dryden and Pound demonstrate, "albeit
[each] with varying degrees of finality," the extent to which "a poet's
words and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance" and
the consequent obligation of style to "admit the contrary of that which
it affirms."
Such are "the essential facts" for Hill. From the sentence which
opens the
New and Collected Poems
-
"Against the burly air I strode/
Crying the miracles of God" - to the concluding one-sentence poem,
Memory worsening - let it go as rain
streams of half-visible clatter of the wind
lapsing and rising,
that clouds the pond's green mistletoe of spawn,
seeps among nettlebeds and rust-brown sorrel,
perpetual ivy burrowed by weak light,
makes carved shapes crumble: the ill-weathering stone
salvation's troth-plight, plumed, of the elect
("Sorrel")
Hill has set the "carved shapes" of inherited poetic form, among them
the powerful sonnet sequences which have marked the various turns of
his career, against the rain's "lapsing and rising," the wind's "half-visible
clatter." (Of his most recent sequence, the eight-part "De Jure Belli Ac
Pacis" ['on the law of war and peace'], the p;esent collection includes
just the two first poems; the full suite - titled after the treatise by the
seventeenth-century jurist Grotius which forms the basis of modern
international law, and dedicated to Hans-Bernd von Haeften, one of the
members of the Kreisau Circle who was hanged with other members of
the resistance group after the attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944 -
was not published until last year, in the British journal
Agenda.)
Instances of factive resistance - with politics, poetry, natural history
and matters of faith impinging on one another - have supplied Hill with
subject-matter as well as vocabulary, rhythm and syntax for his poetry.
Ever-worsening memory, in the twin senses of "deterioration of
memory" and "accumulating horrors to be remembered," is somehow
