Selected Poems

Part of a major relaunch of Penguin's contemporary poetry, Hill's Selected is published alongside Derek Mahon, Sophie Hannah and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and follows February's Selecteds by Roger McGough, Tony Harrison, Carol Ann Duffy and James Fenton

This first selection of Geoffrey Hill's poetry charts the evolution of a complex, uncompromising, visionary body of work over fifty years. It includes poems from Hill's astonishing debut, For the Unfallen, through the verset-sequence Mercian Hymns, to acclaimed recent work, including The Orchards of Syon and Without Title.

Hill so entirely eclipses most of his contemporaries that it seems meaningless to rank in relation to them. Trumpets should be blown, garlands made ... loquacious, playful, wildly comic ... poignant. His greatness is as certain as that of the poets he invokes

Whatever the densities of Hill's expression, or the powerful impacted forces in his syntax and rhythms, this poetry achieves a strength, memorability and precision beyond the abilities of any other poet writing in English

Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, Geoffrey Hill is the author of three books of criticism and eleven books of poetry, including The Triumph of Love, co-winner of the Heinemann Award. His Collected Poems, Canaan, The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech!, The Orchards of Syon, Scenes from Comus and Without Title are all published by Penguin. Hill currently lives and teaches in Massachusetts, where he is Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. He is also Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford; Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and since 1996 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The first Selected from 'England's most important living poet' The Times 
 
'Hill so entirely eclipses most of his contemporaries that it seems meaningless to rank in relation to them. Trumpets should be blown, garlands made ... loquacious, playful, wildly comic ... poignant. His greatness is as certain as that of the poets he invokes' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Whatever the densities of Hill's expression, or the powerful impacted forces in his syntax and rhythms, this poetry achieves a strength, memorability and precision beyond the abilities of any other poet writing in English' Peter McDonald, TLS

Toby Martinez de las Rivas

Geoffrey Hill

Rowan Evans

These Hard and Shining Things

Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) was often considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. Penguin Modern Poets 7: God Is Distant gathers a selection spanning Hill's full body of poetry, from the astonishing power and compression of the first five decades to the greater experimentalism and fluency of the creative outpouring that began in 1997, and places it alongside work by two younger British poets: Rowan Evans, whose 'tirelessly inventive' and 'vivid lyrical work' (Denise Riley, Eric Gregory Award citation) plays with the legacy of late modernism to create poetry of great beauty, energy and precision; and Toby Martinez de las Rivas, whose first two collections have seen his 'visionary disposition' (Guardian) build to astonishing rhetorical heights of Blakean dimensions. 
 
Taken together, these are poems of lucid intensity, high seriousness and knowing sidelong glances, as alert to the natural world of the British countryside as they are to the body that suffers and to questions of the soul. They take a long view of humanity's riches and crises, and consider along the way such issues as morality, faith, innocence, redemption, the public spaces of democracy and the acts of violence that rupture them, as well as that patron animal of the Modern Poets series: the urban fox.

Geoffrey Hill

Books by Geoffrey Hill

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter