'A Way of Reading the World'

“Poetry gives us a way of reading the world. Through its cadences, through its different ways of simultaneously conveying reason and feeling and the human senses, poetry makes it possible for people to express thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” Almost a decade has passed since the death of Geoffrey Hill. The Age of Hill is over, assuming it ever started. He was the dominant English poet after the deaths of Auden and Larkin. He died June 30, 2016, at age eighty-four. For his final twenty years, a prolific time for Hill, I read him expectantly, waiting for his next volume. He was never a member of the Mary Oliver School of Poetry Niceness and possessed an Old Testament ferocity. The words above were spoken by his widow, Alice Goodman, a librettist and Anglican priest, months after her husband’s death. She writes: “‘How does this line sound?’ ‘Have a look at this,’ we said to each other over and over again. We played with words. We argued accents and stresses, and the…