High above the lectern, there are names:  Beethoven, Washington, David, Moses, Isaiah, Jefferson, Shakespeare. I meditate on the possibility of Geoffrey Hill's name wedged gently between these historical giants. As I am ushered to my seat in this softly lit auditorium, I thank the echelons of the 92nd Street Y for including Hill in their reading series. Except for security repeatedly waving their flashlights to examine ticket stubs, the tone of the evening is unspoiled.

Considered by many to be England's most illustrious living poet (by Harold Bloom, as successor to Milton, Blake, and Lawrence), Geoffrey Hill is distinguished by his attachment to European Christendom. Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932 and educated at Oxford, he gained ascendancy early in his career for his devotion to Genesis as a literary text. In 1958, the publication of his first collection of poetry, For The Unfallen, won him a complex reputation that followed him around England as well as in the United States. Hill's devotion to European events, specifically the Holocaust, is incurable and remains the focal point of his poetry. His writing is devotional, yet iconoclastic, if such a juxtaposition is possible. Today, Hill's work is still marked by conflicting critical reviews—'dolorous,' 'intransigent,' 'intolerant,' 'genius.'

"It's not that I am belligerent, it's that the world is difficult," Hill says apologetically after a long silence between poems. He is an aging man shrouded in black, serious and sorrowful, helplessly romantic. In 1939, only seven years after Hill was born, the reading/lecture series at the 92nd Street Y commenced. Started by German-Jewish professionals, the Y has long been New York's bastion of Jewish culture. As such, proponents of the Y have spent over one hundred years grappling with and responding to the political, cultural, and artistic events of the twentieth century. In 1940, while New York's literary community was gearing up for its first year of distinguished guests, then eight-year-old Geoffrey Hill witnessed the Nazi bombing that destroyed Coventry. Sixty-two years later he would appear at the 92nd Street Y to recall this act of witnessing.

The auditorium is barely lit and only half filled. Latecomers file in every few minutes, unsure whether they are in fact in the right place. The hall has the ambience of a nighttime funeral, and I half expect to witness a pall-bearing procession down the center aisle when Hill's reading is done. Drawing mostly from The Orchards of Syon, his ninth book, published in March by Counterpoint Press, he reads, "…Her decencies / Stand bare, not barely stand. In the skeletal / Orchards of Syon are flowers…" Though Hill's words are clearly delivered, as if from the mouth of God, the audience grows increasingly uncomfortable—bored. The woman beside me crosses and uncrosses her legs every three minutes. A man squirms in his seat. Another yawns. The serious nature of Hill's work rubs off like an Easter Sunday mass. A fog of shame and remorse rises. This is, I assume, Hill's intention.

It is not exactly like listening to Bach's Goldberg Variations, it is more inconsonant, purposefully and skillfully discordant. Hill's work speaks to the epoch that is undeniably marked by post-Holocaust Europe. Toward the end of the evening Hill says, "So much / of time is rubble / as if the gods even now / had faith in us." It is a powerful and chilling moment. He pauses, as if suffering the effect of hearing his own words for the first time aloud.

Hill unabashedly implicates his readers in the act of witnessing, which is both an ecclesiastical and ecumenical feat.

The old
artifice so immediate, the delight
comprehends our measure:  knowledge granted
at the final withholding, the image that is
to die, the creature, the rock of transience.

The evening could have easily been a funeral, a baptism, or a first communion—sermonized by the language of birth and death. However, Hill's work is less hyperbolic than one might expect, given the subject matter. At a time when many artists succumb to sensationalizing and exaggerating the atrocities of the Second World War, Hill tactfully steers clear. With his priest-like demeanor, Hill is unfashionably devoted to the inglorious power of language, language that subtly chastises and quietly interrupts.

(Kimberly Burwick joined the magazine's editorial staff in September. [Masthead])
[Since 1988, Geoffrey Hill has taught at Boston University.—Eds.]