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“... a consciously smooth and reader-friendly go at the anachronistic childhood memoir invented by Geoffrey Hill in the pricklier Mercian Hymns. ‘Scripture’ manifests the ‘renewed interest in narrative’ of which the 1982 Introduction spoke; and its subject-matter – school friendships, traumas and epiphanies, seen with ingenious irony as episodes ...”

“... personal friendship or personal feelings. I have published for more than 40 years my gratitude for Hill’s art and for Lowell’s, and for 30 years my gratitude for Hecht’s,’ it is difficult not to feel that the repetitions override the disclaimers, and not to wonder what gratitude is when there is so much of it, and when it has been so insistently ...”

“... trade in pathos are applauded for at one point departing into anti-pathos – Ted Hughes in Crow, Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns and J.H. Prynne in Brass. The reader appealed to, or ‘made’, by these books is defined only by tautology: he is the reader who prefers comedy, or ‘ferocious banter’, to elegy, or the celebration of departed glories. Who ...”

“... into his sixties, and he, too, is concerned with the retrieval of a North Country past. Perhaps Geoffrey Hill has given the English North the imaginative status which the Irish Revival gave to the West of Ireland. There is the same attribution of authenticity, the same regret for its loss or dilution, the same sense of a past miles deep. There are ...”

“... to claim is the workhouse, the institution which haunts this book. Her great-grandmother Sarah Hill is a pitiful representative of the poor who travel through Light’s reconstructions of the past. The daughter of an unmarried and destitute servant girl, Sarah spent the first nine years of her life in the Cheltenham workhouse where she was born. She was ...”

“... acquired a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both ...”

“... outside the Catholic churches, the big run is on the local Irish papers. Lonely on Highgate Hill outside St Joseph’s Church I rushed to buy my Dundalk Democrat and reading it I was back in my native fields. Now that I analyse myself I realise. that throughout everything I write, there is this constantly recurring motif of the need to go back ... So it ...”

“... Book), all make this a criticism willing to ‘take the rap’. Davie is caustic about the way Geoffrey Hill teases that phrase in his critical prose, and Hill is often himself made to take Davie’s rap. There is a telling account of Ted Hughes’s and Hill’s varyingly suspect ...”

“... The Plashy Fen School.’ But they don’t. Like the independent Ian Hamilton Finlay, and like Geoffrey Hill, to whom the early Reading of such phrasing as ‘congregations/are still here mulched into the cider orchard’ pays his dues, this is a poet who likes to investigate the strains and alliances between violence and the language of art. He is ...”

“... says, we ought to join them, or rather change them and use them in surprising ways, like the poets Geoffrey Hill and Bob Dylan, who is admired for altering ‘Take it to heart’ to ‘Take it to your heart.’ No cliché is irredeemable; we should seize on them, give them, so to speak, a new loss of life, and so contribute to the renovation of the ...”

“... locutus est.’ In a much-quoted footnote to his review of The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, Geoffrey Hill complained about the decline of Eliot’s poetry from the ‘pitch’ of ‘Prufrock’ to the ‘tone’ of Four Quartets, the former as thrillingly unstable as the latter is calculated and reassuring. Donoghue isn’t having any of it, but ...”

“... Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and many jokes; Keats-Byron-Tennyson-Dryden-Shakespeare-Beckett-Hill running giddily into each other; but each writer and observation given its space to illuminate and be illuminated into a radiant energy, which conveys, above all, that literature matters and that it also matters to get everything as right as one humanly ...”

“... heartnear’. Geoffrey Hill had a good time with the title of Celan’s collection Atemwende, or Breathturn (1967). In The Orchards of Syon (2002) he anglicises ‘breathturn’ into ‘turn of breath’. But he also has ...”

“... the poems are donnishly based on literary jokes like these, and probably the best in the book is a Geoffrey Hill parody which pictures Hill playing tennis against his devoted admirer Martin Dodsworth: Who crouches at the net, his mouth compressed Severely to a little Gothic slit? On the whole, though, the book falls ...”

“... fields of EEC oil seed rape and travelled up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off ...”