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Geoffrey Hill’s latest volume comes with the now usual awe-struck encomia on its back cover - “The greatest living poet in the English language”, “...probably the best writer alive in prose or rhyme (sic)”, “The finest British poet of our time” and so on. This kind of hyperbolic chorus can be counter-productive, especially when it is accompanied, as it is here, with a photograph of the great man glaring out menacingly at prospective punters as if daring them to contradict his admirers’ claims.

     The blurb tells us that ‘The Orchards of Syon’ is “Hill’s Paradiso, a Dantean eclogue...” though I cannot see that it resembles Dante’s masterpiece in any way nor does it, in form or substance, read like the pastoral dialogue that I understand by “eclogue”. In fact it consists of seventy-two cantos or interrelated poems, each of 24 lines of free verse. Sometimes he seems to be addressing an unspecified and voiceless someone, at other times simply soliloquising on life, art, love, time and old age and the end of age.

     There are some descriptive passages of considerable power and vividness and the language is often able to modulate from the abstract and highly rhetorical to a jaunty vernacular without any sense of dislocation. Sometimes the diction is puzzling and it seems that Hill is striving too hard for the word that will both surprise and delight: for instance he speaks of the sea “that rides from darkness on to a skirr/ and pash of shingle” and “some demon/ chobbles its rap-cassette...” where “pash” and “chobbles” seem more jabberwocky than valuable coinages and elsewhere he uses “girns” and “hunkers” in contexts that make no sense that I can see. It is probably this laudable desire to leaven the rich latinate sonorities of much of his verse that also prompts him to refer matily to Tom Wyatt and Bert Lawrence, though mercifully he stops short of calling Hopkins Gerry.

     ‘The Orchards of Syon’ is a difficult poem but it will reward the patient reader with moments of pleasure and even occasional flashes of enlightenment. Hill is fond of making gnomic assertions like “Whatever’s cryptic is Polish”. I am afraid many readers will find much, if not all, of ‘The Orchards of Syon’ to be in Polish.