For I Will Consider My Cat — Started #reading: Selected Poems, by Paul Celan...

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Finished #reading Collected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill. Nothing I could say on Hill could improve on Rowan Williams’ description in this appreciation written after Hill’s death last year: “[Hill’s] poetry [is] tantalising, sometimes infuriating,...

Finished #reading Collected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill. 

Nothing I could say on Hill could improve on Rowan Williams’ description in this appreciation written after Hill’s death last year: 

[Hill’s] poetry [is] tantalising, sometimes infuriating, important, compelling … [characterised by] a sheer fluency with sound that can appear in lyrical elegance, grinding puns, carefully calculated shifts of tone or register, multilingual play. He speaks from deep inside his language. The reader sees the ripple on the surface, puzzling, even apparently arbitrary; but not the fathoms-down movement on the seabed. To read with understanding, you have to join him down there, which is an arduous journey and often frustrating, but generates a sense of challenge and vital unsettlement.

Hill’s poetry is notoriously “difficult”, an accusation which (Williams writes) Hill “triumphantly embraced”: 

If difficulty is a problem, that suggests that the point of a poem is to be decoded. What if that isn’t the point?

This book covers Hill’s poetry from 1959 to 1984. At times I found it something of a slog, but his “thickened and strengthened” language (as one critic describes it) is constantly compelling. Reading Canticle for Good Friday will give you an idea of what to expect. I also loved his poem inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer Christmas Trees.

Then there’s this extraordinary poem, Lachrimae Amantis, one of “seven passionate Pavans” from his 1978 collection, Tenebrae: 

What is there in my heart that you should sue
so fiercely for its love? What kind of care
brings you as though a stranger to my door
through the long night and in the icy dew

seeking the heart that will not harbour you,
that keeps itself religiously secure?
At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire
your passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.

So many nights the angel of my house
has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,
whispered ‘your lord is coming, he is close’

that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time
bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse:
‘tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.’

My favourite of the books that are collected in this volume, though, may well be Mercian Hymns (1971), a sequence of prose poems which is summarised well in this review as addressing “national identity, collective memory, the nature of authority and worth, Englishness and the English landscape” in language that, while possessing all the heft of Hill’s other work, is also Hill at his most readable – and also at his funniest. 

At some point I should probably check out Hill’s later work. But for now, something lighter…

reading finished reading in 2017 poetry geoffrey hill
Finished #reading Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin. This is exactly what it says: Larkin’s collected poems, arranged in the four collections published in his lifetime, followed by poems published in Larkin’s lifetime but not included in those...

Finished #reading Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin. 

This is exactly what it says: Larkin’s collected poems, arranged in the four collections published in his lifetime, followed by poems published in Larkin’s lifetime but not included in those collections. 

The arrangement allows us to see how Larkin developed over his career. His first collection, The North Ship (1945), showed promise but was (to me) unremarkable. In the second collection, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin is finding his voice, with highlights including Maiden Name, At Grass, and the classic, Church Going, which moves from sly digs at John Betjeman (“Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t”) to the soberly moving final stanza:

A serious house on serious earth it is, 
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, 
are recognised, and robed as destinies. 
And that much can never be obsolete, 
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious, 
And gravitating with it to this ground…

The Whitsun Weddings (1964) is, of course, the peak of Larkin’s career, from which his most well-loved poems – certainly those most quotable in polite company – come, including MCMXIV (”Never such innocence again”) and An Arundel Tomb (“What will survive of us is love” – a line frequently quoted out of context, despite the poem’s insistence that it is, at best, only “almost” true). 

Which brings us to High Windows (1955), a harder collection to love. This is where you’ll find Larkin’s poems that are most quotable in impolite company: most notably, This Be The Verse (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”) and Annus Mirabilis (“Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three”). The poetry can still be astonishing – the final stanza of the title poem is breathtaking – but overall this phase, with Larkin curdling into middle-aged bitterness, is hard work to read. 

As a consequence, by the time I got to the “uncollected poems” at the end, I was feeling a bit Larkined out, and rather skipped through this section. Almost at the end, though, is one final beauty: The Mower, where Larkin describes inadvertently killing a hedgehog as he mows his lawn: 

Next morning I got up and it did not. 
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time. 

finished reading in 2017 reading philip larkin poetry
Finished #reading Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami. ““We do things you can’t put into words,” Sumire would probably tell me, putting it into words all the same. (p.194) ” This is something like how I feel about this book on finishing it. I...

Finished #reading Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami. 

“We do things you can’t put into words,” Sumire would probably tell me, putting it into words all the same. (p.194) 

This is something like how I feel about this book on finishing it. I loved it, but there is little I can intelligently say about it. Like poetry: if there were another way to say it, there wouldn’t be any need to say it like that.

Among the many things that this novel is, it’s an exploration of how fortuitous it is, how contingent, how unlikely, for anyone to find someone whom they both love and desire, and who both loves and desires them in return: 

This woman loved Sumire, but couldn’t feel any sexual desire for her. Sumire loved this woman and desired her. I loved Sumire and felt sexual desire for her. Sumire liked me, but didn’t love me, and didn’t feel any desire for me. I felt sexual desire for a woman who will remain anonymous. But I didn’t love her. (pp.135f.) 

You’re left wondering how any of us manage it. 

There are many theories on the internet about the ending and about What It All Means. Some of those theories I agree with, some I don’t; I’ll have to think about it. But I suppose the real point is: it’s the sort of book that generates theories about it; when in fact there is no “right” answer, no one single “true meaning”. If there is a key, it’s been dropped into a river. 

It also feels like a book that will leave a longer and deeper effect on me than the previous Murakami I read, A Wild Sheep Chase. We’ll see. 

reading finished reading in 2017 haruki murakami sputnik sweetheart
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