Speech! Speech!

Paperback original. Slim 8vo. 60 pp. Illustrated wraps. Originally published in the United States by Counterpoint in 2000 in a case-bound issue, this is the first U.K. edition.

Poetry Book Society Choice. A book of 120 twelve-line verses, one for each of the days of Sodom. More pertinent than ever, in an era when public speech has been hijacked by demagogues and their online enablers, how do we even begin to think and speak honestly? Being the third instalment in the author's poetry quartet that began with Canaan (1996), continued with The Triumph of Love (1998), and book-ended with The Orchards of Syon (2002).

Each a distinct and complete aesthetic statement in its own right, together they form a kind of high-modernist Dantean eclogue in which the landscape of the poet's youth – rural Worcestershire – offers a glimpse of paradise amidst the cacophony of the modern world. "Geoffrey Hill is the central poet-prophet of our augmenting darkness, and inherits the authority of the visionaries from Dante and Blake on to D.H. Lawrence. The reader winces at, and then is astonished by, the force and humour of Speech! Speech!." –Harold Bloom