Speech! Speech!

by Geoffrey Hill

This British poet, who has a reputation for writing serious, philosophic poems, presents a book-length piece. In these 120 12-line stanzas, he alludes to the literary past of Europe, while despairing at the media-driven culture of the present day. This is Hill's eighth collection.

Available editions of Speech! Speech!

	9781582430980, Hardcover, Perseus Books Group, 2000 $1.93 (Unknown) Other copies of 9781582430980

Publisher Notes

Geoffrey Hill's last poetic work, The Triumph of Love, was the co-winner of this year's Heinemann Book Award, the major prize awarded by England's Royal Society of Literature. His new poem cycle, Speech! Speech!, is a sequel of sorts, and that rarest of things: a tour de force that is both tragic and excruciatingly comic. As imperious as the King, forever issuing commands, and as perilously ingenious in rejoinder as the Fool, the voices of Geoffrey Hill here vie to outjest each other-outrage each other-yet also to soothe implacable injuries. Whose injuries, exactly? To some degree (third degree), the poet's own-but not his alone, yours too, gentle reader. Injuries inflicted as well as endured. In its ferocity and love, in its glimpses of timeless beauty (how natural the natural kingdom can be), even in the praises it bestows (upon the savage farce of Daumier, or the dear measure of Holst, or the clear-eyed endurance of Balzac), Speech! Speech! is a supreme "how to" book. How to be (or at least how to begin the process of being) honest. In speech, for a start. With a poem for each of the 120 days of Sodom, it may go too far-but then, as T. S. Eliot said, it is only by going too far that you find out how far you can go. This is History (and yet how different from Robert Lowell's unrolling) and these are Dream Songs (and as nightmarishly just as John Berryman's visions). Not self-expression, but self-explosion. A challenge to all concerned.