Clavics by Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill. Clavics. London. Enitharmon (Dufour, distr.). 2011. isbn 9781907587115 Only a poet with a sense of time as expansive as Geoffrey Hill’s would attempt an elegy for a man dead almost four hundred years, as Hill does for the composer William Lawes. Yet Clavics is morethanalamentfortheloyalistcomposer slain in battle at Rowton Heath. It isameditationontimeandmemory,on faith and the struggle to believe. Hill’s poetry has always been allusive , not merely as a matter of technique but also as a matter of subject, which is to say that he uses allusion to ruminate on memory itself. This tendency is evident in the form Hill adapts for Clavics, each section broken between two halves, the first of which mirrors George Herbert’s “The Alter,” the second his “Easter Wings.” Herbert’s poetry is itself a site of struggle between faith and doubt, and Hill appropriates this agon for his own purposes , pushing it even further with a syntax that strains against meaning. With the struggle for comprehension a central theme in the work, Clavics will certainly not lessen Hill’s reputation as a “difficult” poet, a point the book’s opening lines recognize in comparing the work at hand to Kabbalah and to numerology. Yet when Clavics stumbles, obscurity is not at fault; abstraction is. In place of the vivid engagement with the concrete world that typifies such Hill classics as Mercian Hymns, the poem aims to maintain its momentum through accumulation of abstract statement. Consider these lines from the twenty-third section: “Dearly beloved, grasp these sureties: / Decrepit lies the world and all things fail, / Exact their toll; / the Judgement must / Make trial, trust / Late Dorothy’s – Doctor D. Bethurum ’s – Lorn expertise / Locked in her Sermo Lupi ad Anglos.” Knowing that Bethurum is an editor of the homilies of Wulfstan II, in which one may read the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, may relieve the passage of its obscurity but not of its lack of concreteness. Even when Hill seems to offer a solid image, he doesn’t, as in his reference to “the dense / Fluctuations of the material” or his statement that “aesthetics are an inclined plane.” Both phrases flirt with the physical but lack enough detail to make the image real. Yet one keeps reading, despite all that, because Clavics is wonderful for its sense of play in language and in time: words collapsing into other words, times collapsing into other times. Such play amounts at its best to what Hill himself calls “wit lettipple into Grace.” At a high point in his career, when other poets may be tempted to wax sententious, Hill remains playful and interesting. This sense of serious fun covers a multitude of sins and is one reason Hill remains a major presence in Englishlanguage poetry. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Laurynas Katkus. Bootleg Copy. Kerry Shawn Keys, tr. Chicago. Virtual Artists Collective. 2011. isbn 9780983009153 “Ode to Jellyfish,” the most accessible poem in Laurynas Katkus’s new collection , offers more clues to the Lithuanian poet’s preoccupations than to his poetic method. It begins by listing what the creature doesn’t have—complexity , connection to the struggles of the confusing upper world—and what it does, “an elemental perfection.” Other poems attempt to confront that complexity and the confusion that it occasions in humans. The city is presented in jagged, jarring images, as in “the bedding’s cooled down scum on the milk / sirens late at night”; the speaker is “attached so much to what is cramped, what smells, / What weighs one down, and conceals. . . .” Time passes but does not progress, and “we are always at loose ends.” One section attempts, by assembling fragmentary memories, to recall the essence of people who have died, but these never quite make a whole. Another contains what might be called love poems but are really about desire, and they evoke the presence rather than the person of the other. 70 | World Literature Today wltreviews

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