Without Title, by Geoffrey Hill.

Geoffrey Hill's name is dropped fashionably into conversations by aspiring students of literature and editors of high-ranking journals alike. He is promoted widely by a variety of world-brand publishers. He has been referred to as the finest living English poet: it is clear that the emphasis is on "English." The tradition he works in is broadly Oxonian: strongly reiterate the literary debt to our Western European tradition and for a measure of obscurity, if you're going to talk about life, talk about it through the lens of nature. But don't think Hill fits well into this clique.

Before I entered the Sheldonian Theatre (Oxford) on February 1^st, 2006, a young student stopped me in the streets to ask why we were all queuing outside the Sheldonian on such a cold night. I replied, "to hear Geoffrey Hill." The student retorted before moving on: "Oh…still alive is he?" Hill has been here throughout the ages.

Hill was there to promote his new collection, Without Title. Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian delivered showers of praise upon the new collection: here is a poet "...making the language perform tricks for him…" and who "…gives his poetry wings again, and for all the grimed orchards we begin to see something like happiness." I would tend to agree. He read two to three poems from each of his poetry collections, beginning with two written at Keble during his second year as an undergraduate. Those first two poems formed the basis of his undergraduate poetry collection in 1952.

The seated crowd was peppered with Oxford students, practicing poets in their mid-twenties, Oxford graduates, and a hardcore readership of poetry. Of course, there were the usual postgraduate DPhil'ers and PhD'ers pouring over Hill's poetry as if his art were a grand collection of analytic propositions and judgements. The conversation was high with "oh... have you read Eliot's letters, apparently some were destroyed when..." through to "I've read his poetry, it's very good you know." The audience chatter drew to an immediate hush as soon as Hill entered the room.

As a graduate of Keble College, University of Oxford, it was clear that this occasion marked a homecoming for Hill. He has been an Honorary Fellow at the College, among other prestigious English and American university titles that have been bestowed upon him. If Oxford the place (and the status of the University) affects your view on Oxford's poets, then Hill probably is not the poet for you. Call it conservatism. Call it Oxonian elitism. Call it obscure. Call it inaccessible twaddle. The trouble sits with the fact that if you are to judge a poet such as Hill simply by his establishment history and background, then you've missed a huge portion of his poetry (and accordingly, you are likely to miss the importance of poetry in general). I argue this simply because I have seen some other talents despair at his dense and allusive style for this very reason.

Hill's poetry is not as simple as the orthodox Oxbridge-drone that it is on occasion rubbished for. It remains very rich in experience, locating childhood memories in Worcestershire through to the loss of his father. Perhaps it has not become clear how important ideas of family and father are on Hill's work at this point in time, but he spoke a few words about his father both through his poetry and commentary at the readings. He talked — as he often does — about how his home backyard was raised to the level of the roof of the house so that you could see above the roofs of the other houses. (He also reminded himself that was entirely irrelevant to the meaning of any of his poems). In fact, these occasional comments helped to explain how references such as those to Turing and Morecambe were initiated from recollections of childhood with his father. Perhaps I overemphasise a sense of ageing and loss here since this matter became just one of many noticeable features at the reading. Indeed, it is only of the many themes in Without Title, which, Robert Potts of The Observer argues, has found itself "continuing explorations of faith, politics, history and morality, as well as ... erotic love, ageing and loss." Hill has not had his day yet and his intense poetic format should not yet be scorned — rather enjoyed.

It is certain that his intellectual density and intensity are not popular among those favouring a hip street-styled lyricism bandied about in many of the London and Liverpool cliques. Yet it is that density and intensity which prove him to be the most committed of poets — poetry is his telos. I could not say the same of many of his contemporaries. He has no overriding vendetta, grudge, trendy leftie-image, burning topical human rights issue or political sideline concern to win the crowds; he manages to win readers though his poetry. Be clear: this is not blind conservatism. It is dedication. In this sense, he is something of an oddity. It remains unclear what Fuller, Fenton or Constantine have ever thought about such an oddity in the midst of the Oxen ford tradition — though perhaps like Hill, in their own rituals and rights, each of them remains an oddity.

Is Hill a confusing poet? Without a doubt — yes. Analysts and essayists tend not to get beyond the conclusion that Hill's poetry is "dense and allusive". I can sympathise with their frustration — the esoteric nature of this poetry is not for the faint-hearted. Yet, if you are looking for something else beyond the transparent features in contemporary poetry, then Hill's Without Title is definitely worth considering. The immediate transparency of democratic poetry is a crime on Hill's account, so don't go looking for Duffyesque lines. In fact, as Hill would probably defend, there is nothing democratic about writing immediately transparent poetry - this does not presuppose intelligent beings, but an idiotic mass searching through the stodgy cesspool of accepted method and content. For an industry that seems destined for a bout of Harry-Potterism, a poet that finally expects an intelligent reader is a welcome poet.

The hyper-empowerment of this collection's cultural discourse and idioms is confusing, accessible to only very few readers. All I can suggest is that the reader work beyond this gut feeling. As with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the transience of subject, the undisclosed aspect of self, the way in which dialogues and persons are abandoned and then revisited is a symptom of the subject in the modern world. I also find that the education of Hill is such that an attempt to reconstruct his own poetic method is beyond my own understandings, since it encompasses his own clandestine theology, his intense passion for the English language, and direct readings of classical Greek and Latin texts. (Neither do I have any special interest in an exclusive Oxford literary lineage). I admit, as others have, it can leave me confused. However, this confusion does not lead me to abandon his poetry; rather, it has intrigued me.

It was his intense crafting of the language and his truly independent style which paved the way for me, as a reader, giving Hill the benefit of the doubt. I found a number of important poems in Without Title to be of considerable value, in terms of their representation of literature itself, history, love, fate and relationships. The poem that I found most alluring, 'Without Title', assimilates memory, history and love into its lines:

Pheromones moribund, but something other
bemuses mourning, more than vows unmade,
shared life aborted.

The way in which he plays out childhood, and even his dealing with being an infant, arouses the simplistic side of his poetry. This is observed in the Poem 'Jumping Boy' — perhaps the most popular in this collection — which was read at the Sheldonian Theatre and perhaps the most popular material used to promote the collection in a number of media reviews:

Here is the jumping boy, the boy
who jumps as I speak...

Jump away, jumping boy; the boy I was
shouts go.

The significance of his Bromsgrove (Midlands) childhood is already obvious to critics but Without Title does not really continue with those reflections. Beyond childhood, there remains a part of Hill also waiting to break out into the simplicity to be found in the existence and colours of nature. This is particularly true of the poem 'In Ipsley Church Lane 2':

Sage-green through olive to oxidized copper,
the rainward stone tower-face. Graveyard
blossom comes off in handfuls — the lilac
turned overnight a rough tobacco brown.

Of course, there is not much of Hill that is simplistic. He has much to say about the awkwardness and equilibrium of social relationships. As I write this review, I am also preparing a review of a French author, Michel Houellebecq, and his most recent novels. Houellebecq often offers humorous insights into the awkwardness of relationships (sexual and other) so perhaps I unconsciously began searching for this theme. I warn myself that this mysterious style in focusing on awkward relationships is testament to Hill's very private, conservative and undisclosed self and the obvious recognition that poetry is something more than simply a disclosure of the private self. Yet Hill is caught up with difficult relationships, the denial of absolute love, and this is clear within the poetry. He quotes a passage from F.H. Bradley in the preliminaries of this collection denoting the rejection of absolute love; love itself relying upon the union of two individuals having their own sense of self-existence. This, I feel, offers the reader an insight into one of the many gems hidden within the text: a secret investigation into the (im)balances of relationships, when duly weighed against memory and cognition.

The centrepiece of the collection is devoted to 'Pindarics'; a sequence of poems focusing upon – and peppered with quotations from – the Italian poet, Cesare Pavese. The only glaring feature of the Pindarics which took me by surprise was Hill's interest in a political theory underpinning the poetry. Beyond the intensely self-referential, the Pindarics delve into a political theory of sorts:

Though refutation's a lost cause at best,
the body politic that does not die
and is not answerable to any God ...

But, again, without a knowledge of Cesare Pavese, the reader is left stumped with a number of the lines — in England, the above insight would belong only to a critique of post-seventeenth century liberal political thought, but in Italy, it is still an issue until this day. However, as I have mentioned, ignore the gut feeling in reading Hill's poetry: this gut feeling is not an issue of immediately apparent meanings of transparent democratic writing, it is one of ignorance. Stay with the poem and persevere with the challenges posed by Hill's "allusive" and esoteric approach – and you will not be disappointed.

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