Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012

"Geoffrey Hill’s enormous oeuvre stands in for any poetry anthology anyone in the midst of grief might feel like turning to. The repetitive act of reading—curative reading—has a very long history, and still today many faced with the prospect of a funeral (or its aftermath) find themselves with a need to read poetry. In terms of what one can manage to process or cope with in times of grief, the shorter the better, sometimes. So, its rhythmic consolation and its brevity are why I’d say to any grieving person, ‘Maybe try some poetry?’. Personally, the trajectory of how I coped—or did not cope—with the loss of my father had a number of points. One of them was just pretending I was fine all the time. Another occurred when I left home and went to university. I became overwhelmingly sad all the time, as in crying every day, and clinically depressed. I stopped reading entirely, which is kind of tough when you’re studying English. [ Laughs .] So I left university for a time to try to recover. The doctor I saw used to check in with me and say, ‘Are you eating?’ And at the beginning I said, ‘No’. ‘Are you reading?’ ‘No’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But at one point I picked up a copy of Geoffrey Hill’s poems and flicked through it. (I’d looked at it before, and even when I was reading, I hadn’t understood a word.) I opened it up to his sequence of poems called ‘Funeral Music’ (1994). I remember exactly where I was sitting on my bed in Finchley. I remember thinking, ‘Funeral music—that seems possibly congruent with how I’m feeling.’ For reasons unknown, I turned to the eighth poem (it’s a series of eight sonnets) and read the poem. I didn’t quite understand it, so I read it again. And again. It’s a poem about some people who died during the Wars of the Roses. But I didn’t know that—didn’t read the footnote, didn’t care. To me, it seemed to be from the voices of ghosts: Not as we are but as we must appear, Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we Desire life but as they would have us live, Set apart in timeless colloquy: I looked at that and suddenly started to think about my father, about the way we project or reimagine those we’ve lost. In the poem, the ghosts are pissed off about being misremembered, over-remembered, or remembered in distortion—‘as they would have us live’. It finishes with a wail of anger where the one of the figures we’re imagining is being “Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place, / Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.” It’s utterly beautiful and it’s difficult : difficult enough to have kept me occupied trying to figure it out like a crossword puzzle. I probably started studying English because of a difficult but consoling poem by John Donne . I’d say this one by Geoffrey Hill is one of the two poems that has made a dramatic difference in my ability to align myself with, or relate to, terrible sorrow. “It’s utterly beautiful and it’s difficult : difficult enough to have kept me occupied trying to figure it out like a crossword puzzle” The late Geoffrey Hill is not the sort of person you’d expect to appreciate one saying ‘Your poem saved my life’, but he actually took it very well when I said it. Though any volume of poetry may be a balm for sadness, I would say that Geoffrey Hill is an extraordinary poet of broken love and grief. (He is a great lover of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry—which makes me think of that extraordinary poem ‘ Spring and Fall ’ . It begins with an address to Margaret, asking her what she is grieving for ‘O Margaret are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?’, and ends with the words ‘It is Margaret you mourn for.’ Full circle. Grief turns on itself.) He’s also written a beautiful poem called ‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’. They are difficult, but I have the airy carelessness of a person who feels it’s okay to own and love a volume of poetry in which you might have only hooked into one poem and read it many times. I don’t understand half of ‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’, but what I do understand is precious, and I know that I’ll return to it. The patience that difficult poetry requires can keep us occupied through difficult periods. It’s the type of patience that grief requires, too: the conviction that I will keep going over it; I have to keep going over it. Some of it will become clearer, and sometimes it’ll just stay un-stuck. Hill is thinking about a different kind of love than the love Rose writes about in Love’s Work . He says, “In broken love you read the signs too late / although they are met with everywhere / like postcards of Manet and Monet, Van Gogh’s shoes.” The poem gives the faint idea they might have had a love affair, but you’re left without the truth. It makes you wonder: What’s the relationship between these two? There are also different textures of grief. There’s the grief of someone who’s encountered a long illness: you know that their death is coming, even if you don’t know what that death will be like. But there’s also the grief of losing someone who drops off the face of the world. All of a sudden. I experienced that while writing The Lost Properties of Love ; I lost a dear friend. They died at fifty of a massive heart attack. And I thought, I’ve missed it. I’ve missed the fucking chance to tell them this, or go there with that, or I didn’t make the most of our last meeting, or I hung up the phone too early. Hill beautifully captures that grief for a missed opportunity: “In broken love we read the signs too late.” That sense that it was all there; it just never came to fruition. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Having never encountered the grief of sudden loss before (and having now, well, not come through it, but experienced it), I have a renewed awe for anyone who has managed to get through that kind of shock. The shock of the person being there today, gone tomorrow. It’s the kind of shock you find Tennyson working through in In Memoriam . Unlike grief you anticipate, you’ve had no opportunity to work through it beforehand, no narrative to build around it. You’re just left on the floor, utterly removed. The poetics of that are very interesting: trying to build something in thin air, or going round and round in circles. It’s a way of replaying trauma."