Oraclau/Oracles by Geoffrey Hill

20 Mar 2011

Oraclau/Oracles
By Geoffrey Hill
Clutag Press, 2010, Hardback, 56pages
ISBN 978-0-9553476-9-6
RRP: £15.00

George Potts

There was a time when a three year period between volumes of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry would not seem out of the ordinary. But since his autumnal flourishing in which he has produced seven books in ten years, Hill fans may have been concerned with the lack of a new publication since 2007’s A Treatise of Civil Power.

However the past three years could prove to be his most fruitful yet. The cover of Oraclau/Oracles, Hill’s latest instalment, informs us that in this time he has completed a staggering five volumes of poetry to be published over the next two years. Following his election as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and the announcement that his Collected Poems 1952-2012 are scheduled for publication in 2013, Hill’s career seems to be reaching a momentous conclusion. On the cover of this latest volume new reviews of Hill have been added to the usual assortment but their praise – ‘the most distinguished exponent of his calling’, ‘the greatest living poet’, ‘the one certain genius’ – remains as strong as ever.

As far as releases go, Oraclau/Oracles has been one of Hill’s most understated in recent times. This edition is beautifully produced by Clutag Press yet it does not seem to have arrived with the same flurry of reviews that greeted earlier Hill volumes. This is a shame because it is one of his most ambitious, taking its metric form from John Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day’ yet extending this over 144 stanzas rather than Donne’s five. That Hill can sustain such energy across this complicated metre is testament to his poetic skill.

Oraclau/Oracles, as its title suggests, meditates upon Hill’s Welsh and English roots, the border country between his twin national heritages. Alongside a more characteristic Hillian epigraph from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, is one by Welsh poet Pennar Davies: their juxtaposition suggests the bi-lingual and bi-cultural inheritance the work examines. One is reminded of Scenes From Comus (2005), itself set in Ludlow on the Welsh borders, in which ‘England ends half way across a field’ in a place of ‘displaced gravity’. This idea of displacement figures prominently in Oraclau/Oracles’s exploration of bi-national heritage. ‘This is a strange country, the words foreign’, Hill writes, a country of ‘misprised coalfields’ and ‘men with white mufflers, coal-greased caps’.

Hill is at his best when describing the Welsh countryside, strikingly evoking the natural beauty of his ancestral landscape:

Distant rain-draped slate flanks gleam like late snow
At high summer as the sun parades them,
Cloud intermittently shades them,
As our eyes interpret shadow;

Hill’s descriptive power and its depth of feeling is remarkable. The image is not static but rather in constant flux as sunlight fades in and out, ‘shadow supplanting shadow’. The minutiae of the landscape are dwelled upon: the sheep’s ‘raw wool-sprouts tangled’ in mountain bushes. This image of natural beauty becomes also a home for sheep ‘angled / Against the field walls’. The stanza’s closing line, ‘the eagle glinting to its lost eyrie’, lingers on a longing for that which is ‘lost’; Hill’s description suggests a similar ‘glinting’ towards his own displaced home. ‘Great shame / I cannot speak or sing / This language of my late awakening’, he laments.

A strong sense of the autobiographical is interwoven with a mournful tone lamenting Wales’ more general cultural displacement. As is characteristic of Hill, such displacement is inherently bound up with that of language itself. ‘True Welsh, I would be monoglot’, he observes, passing over ‘road-signs in Welsh’ before noting that ‘in Welsh; nothing / Certain but what you can assert’. This cultural decline is met with a defence of Hill’s ancestral homeland: ‘Let us draw, there is time, the red dragon. / The implications of its stance eclipse / Destiny in Apocalypse’.

Yet this defiant stance in favour of Welsh culture (‘I argue Behemoth / Not Hobbes’) is undercut by a profoundly elegiac tone. Hill not only memorialises great Welsh figures of the past such as Thomas Vaughn and R. Williams Parry but also laments the country’s more general decline: ‘Think, those entombing pits / Where, I suppose, the odd skeleton still squats’. The ‘misprised coalfields’, now in gradual decline, remain only to be memorialised in art. It is fortunate for us that Hill’s art can still do justice to such memorialisation in Oraclau/Oracles, a challenging but formidable continuation of his poetic output.