Geoffrey Hill reciting "The Storm"

This is for prodsmash2 - well, it depends on what you mean, exactly, by "understand," but, yes, I believe I do. Not everything by Hill - and certainly not his newer stuff - but quite a bit of his early and mid-career poetry. And when I first read that early stuff, I didn't understand it, or not intellectually. I find it takes time to understand Hill. In fact, I had a recent break-through with his Triumph of Love (later stuff): it's begun to make sense after appearing initially impenetrable.

Funny, at its very best, Hill's poetry seems to me to make just about everything else that's out there seem like ideas for poems. He works in words - not ideas - like few others, which is one reason why his poetry is as difficult as it is: words aren't merely a transparent medium for ideas for him, they're the thing itself. See what Seamus Heaney has said about him to that effect.

like this is just the right place for saying that -- a video where geoffrey hill is reciting a translation.

Geoffrey: I guess I'll have settle for this virtual sighting. Wish you were still just up Beacon a ways . . . and I approve of the Moasaic beard . . .