Geoffrey Hill - Clavics

Geoffrey Hill, Clavics (Enitharmon)

I wonder who frames the prices on poetry events for Paddy Power bookmakers. They made Clavics 13/8 favourite for the Forward Prize, ahead of Sean O'Brien who had an unbeaten record at the distance and some other very worthy collections. It could only have been done on the basis of career achievement and 'stature' or reputation. The prize could never have gone to Hill on this form. It was like making Corinthian Casuals favourites for the F.A. Cup.

In his wonderful performance last weekend, Prof. Hill explained his long held admiration for the cover illustration and all but said he wrote the book so that he could make use of it. The other element that has made him so prolific in old age is that the adherence to strict formal requirements help him to produce poems as a knid of midwife to bring forth the work from inside him.

It shows. The form here dictates a disjointed, unpretty poetry that is forced into highly demanding rhyme forms and lines that serve mainly to demonstrate how difficult it is to do. Hill refers us to Herbert's poem Easter Wings, a model of shape but also of diction and syntax, but Herbert's lines fit perfectly into the design whereas in several places Hill's are adjusted by spacing and typography to stretch or bend themselves to his chosen template. None of this seems to be justified, as it were; it is stricture and discipline entirely for its own sake. It is not so much unproductive as counter-productive.

As a tribute to William Lawes, the C17th composer who was killed at the Battle of Chester, 'clavics', it says here, is 'the science or alchemy of keys', so musical keys, then, we can assume is meant. It's not all about Lawes, but, as one would expect from one as expressly difficult as Hill, much more widely referential. If I can't buy the aesthetics of the project, I can take some pleasure in moments and lines, glimpses of Hill's gravely disconsolate view that the world, or more specifically, England, isn't quite what he would like it to be. I doubt if it ever would have been.

In 3, he plays on the name in fashionably Elizabethan-Jacobean ways,

As good epitaphs go Will Lawes is slain

Permit me, sire, is slain by such whose wills

                      Be laws

and, in 9, he ends on the memorable and ever true reflection that,

England rides rich on loss.

And in 26, as Lawes is killed in battle,

                  How your rutter-

        Kin dabbles in these tacky shows.

where a genuinely fine, edgy music transcends its meaning. If only more of the book had been like this. Hill's distemper might be better suited to a freer line but, presumably, that happened in his previous books more than in this one.

The reading last week was a great event and also included poems from other books than this but it was more exciting and satisfying to hear him talk about his work than read it. That wouldn't be said of, say, Bach or Mozart, however much one would love to hear them talk about their music.

Clavics was a false favourite for the Forward Prize and even in the summer I realized that sufficiently to oppose it in the betting. It's just that the judges preferred one of the other books to my choice.