Geoffrey Hill reciting "The Storm"

his translation of Montale's "La Bufera"
-
College de France, march 2008

Category:

Sports

Tags:

• Eugenio
• Montale
• Poetry
• College
• de
• France

[viniciusp]

The Storm that batters the magnolia's

impermeable leaves, the long-drawn drum roll

of Martian thunder with its hail

(crystal acoustics trembling in your night's lair disturb you while the gold transfumed from the mahoganies, the page's rims of de luxe books, still burns, a sugar grain

under your eyelid's shell)

[viniciusp]

lightining that makes stark-white the trees, the walls, suspending them-

interminable instant - marbled manna

and cataclysm - deep in you sculpted,

borne now as condemnation: this binds you

closer to me, strange sister, than any love.

So, the harsh buskings, bashing of castanets and tambourines around the spiler's ditch,

fandango's foot-rap and over all

some gesture still to be defined...

[viniciusp]

As When

you turned away and casting with a hand

that cloudy mass of hair from off your forehead

gave me a sign and stepped into the dark

[bigbadnubbins]

Wow, prodsmash! Thanks for letting us all know about this situation. Perhaps you ought to make such a scandalous bit of news more widely known.

[moralphenomena]

Thanks for the video. Geoffrey Hill is an incredible poet. I'm disappointed that the public has such limited exposure to his work. He is little studied in British acdemic institutions due to cataclysmic decisions on syllabi matters. It seems that poetry is hardly allowed to be difficult; the lines written by Geoffrey Hill are some of the most insitently harrowing, dramatic and absorbing in the language. Unique amongst living poets. His work cannot but be admired...

[RossMcCague]

Season of Stealth blog

Chainlessway youtube

[RossMcCague]

The new Oxford Professor of Poetry, 2011.

[pulsebreathing]

Beautiful words you don't have to be embarrasssed to read.

[alsonross]

Ross McCague Red Cloth Series on youtube in tribute to Hill.

[grobbledonk]

I only meant that someone was obviously surreptitiously aiming a camera at the poet during public performance, rather than being professionally filmed with his complicity. It's the only visual footage of him I'm aware of. When I saw him perform he said "Wild horses wouldn't induce to a public reading were I not professionally compromised"!

[grobbledonk]

Ah yes, I remember now. Yes, I've read that in the blurb too - it's from Englands of the Mind, in which he also discusses Larkin & Hughes.

[mstephe9]

"Words in his poetry fall slowly and singly, like molten solder, and accumulate to a dull glowing nub."

That's the quote exactly, from Heaney's "Selected Prose, 1968-78." However, I can't tell you exactly where in there, as my immediate source is the back-cover of Hill's "New and Collected Poems, 1954-1992" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).