Product Description
This volume brings together poems from four decades of Geoffrey Hill's work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

An excellent collection that will take some digestion
Here, collected in one volume, are Geoffrey Hill's first five books of poetry (For the Unfallen, King Log, Mercian Hymns, Tenebrae, and the Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy), plus a few early versions of poems that later appeared in Canaan. For those who are not yet familiar with Hill's works, this would be the obvious place to start, since his last two works (Speech! Speech!, and The Triumph of Love) are both difficult book length poems, and "Canaan" is not necessarily any easier.

Not that these poems are easy, not even the ones Hill wrote when he was 19 (like "Genesis", the opening poem of the collection). What they are is challenging, beautiful, thoughtful, at times meditative, at times lyrical, often skeptical, almost always wonderful.

These are poems written for those who love poetry and don't mind if it's hard, who can reread a poem ten times in order to appreciate it, who have the patience to learn to read a real poet. Although this book is only 200+ pages, there is a lifetime (almost!) of reflection contained within it, from the early poems reflecting on art, responsibility, history and war in "For the Unfallen", to the funeral music of "King Log", the beautiful prose poems of "Mercian Hymns", and the deeply religious "Tenebrae".

Give it some time. Don't judge it too quickly. Hill will certainly be remembered as one of the greatest poets of the 20th and early 21st centuries, as one who recognized the heavy responsibility of a poet in our times.

A nobbled vernacular?
Or a nobbly vernacular? Perhaps a knackered vernacular. Hill's poetryspeaks a language not far removed from the ordinary, right up against iteven: "not strangeness, but strange likeness". Uncommonlystrange. "Simple, sensuous and direct": a likely story. For"direct" read "dialect", in a poor comedian's travestyof a Chinese accent. But this is poetry that goes to the roots, by oneroute or another, like an underground map of the English language. There is- believe me - nothing abstract or effete about it (laughter). What youhave to know to read it is how to go on reading even when you don't knowwhat you have to know. Now go and read it.

0 out of n readers found thisreview helpful.

challenging reading; not for the timid
Geoffrey Hill is among the best three or four British poets of his generation.His poems are challenging:they require a strong knowledge of history, religion, and literary allusions, as well as the decipherment of thorny syntax and obscure symbolism.But to interpret these traits as weaknesses would be mistaken.One can continue to read verse in the colloquial,Blake/Wordsworth/Frost/Williams tradition ... or one can tackle poetry which requires real effort to understand it.Hill offers the latter. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Interesting off-putting turgid over-written brilliance.
The other reviewers of this compilation of poems note that the author is not accessible.He is a "poet's poet" and "not for everyone".

By this I would guess that they mean hard to read.These poems are written for the select, which could be other poets, possessors of a Master's of Fine Arts, those willing to work hard at what they read, lovers of the English word in its most abstruse and yes, often beautiful.

The reward for hard work is here, in this compilation.All of the poems build, most reward a second or third reading.Few invite, and the book is easy for a lay reader to put down.I am a lay reader of poetry, and prefer Seamus Heaney.I admit to putting the book down a lot. Picking it up only occasionally.

The title, "Selected Poems" argues that someone wanted to open up this poet's work to a larger audience.I am not sure that the author wants to open his work very far.I would say that the poems can be rewarding, but also that they are not intended to be accessible, and are often therefore not enjoyable to a sideways glance sort of reader.

More Menace than Atonement
The peculiar thing about Hill's career is that he wrote five books of poetry from 1950 to 1995, and has written six or seven more since 1995. The Selected is a good introduction to Hill's occasionally sloppy and prosaic later work: the poems included are a lot better than those left out; it turns out that there were, after all, some good poems in Hill's atrocious volume "Speech! Speech!" The Selected is a much more painless introduction to later Hill than the original volumes: with earlier Hill, the situation is somewhat different. A lot of good poems from "King Log" and "Tenebrae" -- poems with passages like this --

The pigeon purrs in the wood; the wood has gone;
dark leaves that flick to silver in the gust,
and the marsh-orchids and the heron's nest,
goldgrimy shafts and pillars of the sun.
...
`O clap your hands' so that the dove takes flight,
bursts through the leaves with an untidy sound,
plunges its wings into the green twilight

above this long-sought and forsaken ground,
the half-built ruins of the new estate,
warheads of mushrooms round the filter-pond.
("Idylls of the King")

have had to be left out, mostly, no doubt, because of a lack of space. This was unfortunate and somewhat avoidable as including the first five books entire would have added fewer than 100 pages to this book.

Hill's combination of lyricism, nostalgia, obscurity, religion, violence (he wrote a famous essay called "Poetry as menace and atonement"), and grumpiness is probably not everybody's cup of tea, but most people interested in poetry _as language_ will find something to enjoy in his work. William Logan remarked that Hill has his finger on the pulse of English more than any other living poet; I'd go further, and say that no 20th century poet has used the language with such consistent authority and richness:

Distant flocks gaze into limestone's half-light.
The full moon, now, rears with unhastening speed,
sketches the black ridge-end, sheds thin lustre
downward aslant its gouged and watered scree.
("Orchards of Syon")

or this, from the last poem in the book:

the humming bird that is not
of these climes; and the great

wanderers like the albatross;
the ocean, ranging-in, laying itself
down on our alien shore.
("Broken Hierarchies")

This much-delayed American edition of Hill's Selected Poems -- it came out in Britain in 2007 or so -- doesn't include the poems in his latest book, _A Treatise of Civil Power_, which came out after the British _Selected_; a few of the poems in _Treatise_ -- "Masques," "The Peacock at Alderton," "Before Senility," "Citations I" -- will eventually be part of the Hill canon. That said, however, there is very little in this book that isn't worth reading, and it will hopefully get Hill at least some new admirers.

Poetry with a Hammer
For decades Geoffrey Hill has been called by critics the best active british poet. And they're right. What's more, barring the possible exceptions of John Ashbery and Derek Walcott, he might be the best living poet in the english language. His range of reference, philosophical weight, obvious technical accomplishment, and severe moral sensibility make Hill's work uncommonly rewarding.

Yet the very things that make his work so consistently good (and I can't think of another poet more consistent) also make his work too demanding to appeal to any but the most dedicated readers of poetry. Like Alvin Feinman (a great poet whom he otherwise doesn't much resemble), Hill demands much from his readers-- possibly too much. He is pretty much guaranteeing himself the moniker of "poet's poet" (not a label to sneeze at, of course, but not perhaps the best way to broadcast a poetics of such moral seriousness). Still, the device of a "selected poems" keeps things from becoming too overwhelming, giving us an overview of his entire career and, therefore, a chronology to help us along.

If anyone wants to read a wonderful, if demanding, contemporary poet then Geoffrey Hill is your man. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Brilliant!
John Hollander calls Hill "the finest British poet of our time." The praise is worthilly placed. He is a powerful force in the realm of literary thought, and beyond. Any souls who have read the essayist work of Dorothy Sayers or G.K Chesterton will find in these pages of Hill a literary kinship of souls. Although their ideas may differ, one can easilly imagine these three essayists gathered around the same table exchanging vigorous thoughts. Hill seems to possess the temperament of ruggedness with contemplation that is Seamus Heaney.

Some of the previous reviewers criticized the essays as lacking coherence; they forget these are essays, not a formal treatise. The essays are Hill's look from various angles and postures of thought along one line of thought.

As far as what one reviewer referred to as his crankiness, it is refreshing to find a contemporary writer standing firmly upon thoughts not influenced merely by the latest literary fads. In this way he is, as all the best artists, brilliantly and refreshingly original.

Erudite but bizarre
I was introduced to Geoffrey Hill, both as poet and critic, by a friend whom I told of my love for 17th-century English literature.Style and Faith has only deepened this love, but it was an entangling, rather than enchanting, encounter for me.

I found Hill to be at his best when he tackles the literature directly, as in the essay on Vaughn's "Night" and, to a lesser degree, the essay paralleling Hooker and Burton. Hill's gratitude for this literary and spiritual heritage is profound and infectious.In addition, the bibliographical reach of the book is wonderful and has led me to make many further related purchases.

But his loyalty to these distant icons of an age with a greatly different "pitch" than ours can handicap Hill as well. This shows most in his book reviews, which, though pointed and learned, are impossibly crabbed and narrow. For instance, while there is no doubt (in my mind, at least) that the power of Scripture as written in English is closely dependent on the translator's style, to insist, as Hill does, that it is an abomination of the highest order to publish Tyndale's New Testament with modern spelling is patently ridiculous.Style and faith are definitely linked, but faith and orthography are not.

Nevertheless, there are few critics writing for the public who are as steeped in our literary inheritance as Hill, and these essays, while erratic, are highly valuable.

An important collection of previously published articles
Geoffrey Hill is most commonly recognised as one of the most difficult, and important, poets of our day. Born in Bromsgrove, England, in 1932, Hill has written several volumes of excellent poetry. However, he is also a first-class literary historian and critic, as is evident from this collection of seven previously published articles, which date from 1989 to 1999. Five of them stem from the Times Literary Supplement, such as the first two, which are review articles on the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, in 1989, and on a 'modernized spelling' version of Tyndale's bible, and the Revised English Bible, a new translation. With a skill few others could hope to match, Hill weighs the value and inadequacies of the works. Other articles include a rumination on Henry Vaughan's "The Night" and other forays into 16th and 17th century literature, his area of expertise.

While I would heartily recommend Hill's first two volumes of criticism, "The Lords of Limit", and "The Enemy's Country", to anyone interested in poetry, 16th/17th century literature, or Geoffrey Hill himself, it is harder to unreservedly praise this latest offering. This is not because it offers "nothing new" -- that is not my chief reservation. It is rather that the selection seems at times to lack coherence. One would have liked to have had perhaps another article, written especially for this volume, or at least an introduction of sorts that placed the individual essays in relation to one another and to the poet-critic's work as a whole.

Despite this minor criticism, this work offers a serious perspective unavailable elsewhere, and contains enough gems to warrant a good deal of study. ... Read more

Product Description
In Geoffrey Hill's words, "The poet's job is to define and yet again define. If the poet doesn't make certain horrors appear horrible, who will?" This astonishing book is a protest against evil and a tribute to those who have had the courage to resist it.Amazon.com Review
The Triumph of Love is a swan song for our most violentand turbulent of centuries. Geoffrey Hill has a reputation as adifficult poet, and it's true that this volume is no easy read, butit's by no means inaccessible, either. Forming a book-length poemdivided into 150 sections, its free verse is rich with allusions fromPetrarch to the Scott expedition and dense with the weight of historyand philosophy. Hill takes nothing less than suffering as his subject,and his poems aren't shy about staring evil straight in the face--inparticular, the Holocaust, an evil compounded by our inability todistinguish one of its victims from the next: "this, and this, / theunique face, indistinguishable, this, these, choked in a cess-pit ofleaking Sheol." If the subject matter is uniformly somber, the styleis not. Fragmented, colloquial, often interrupted by editorial asides,parodies, and snatches of song, The Triumph of Love markssomething of a departure from the stately formalism of Hill's earlierbooks. Through it all runs the self-interrogating, self-mocking voiceof the poet, questioning his right to write about such matters as wellas the language he uses to do so. In the end, however, Hill finds thatthe elegy itself is the only answer to the questions history poses."What / Ought a poem to be?" he asks himself, and answers (threetimes), "a sad and angry consolation." Widely recognized as oneof Britain's distinguished poets, here Hill has produced a memorablysad and angry consolation for "a nation / with so many memorials butno memory." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

MADDENING!
Out of some forty or so reviews on Amazon, this is the first time I have given a book or CD a mere three stars rather than five -- and feel humiliated to do so, because facing Hill I am intellectually short-changed. I find Geoffrey Hill in THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE crushed by the melancholy of learning -- and by history as well, and the agonies of the 20th century. Having lived through most of the 20th century, I find his references to Chamberlain and other disasters aren't beyond me. The first reviewer above (or below) says he read TRIUMPH OF LOVE three times, the third with a dictionary and an encyclopedia, and achieved satori. Much recent poetry is hard to take in on a single reading, although reading aloud helps (as I did with Hill--well, the words I could pronounce -- and I did find some personal, feelingful passages, believe me!) but upon rereading an unfamiliar poet is often moving and worth my effort -- as Hill may yet prove to be. Marina Tsvetaeva, for instance, is hard to read, her prose much less so than her verse -- although I understand that in Russian even her prose gets surreal and more demanding and distant than in English, but nonetheless I am carried away by her and seek out all her work, prose and verse. Despite my horror over TRIUMPH OF LOVE, I have ordered his SELECTED POEMS that's out this year and will give him one more chance. Even more large hearted of me, I've ordered his recent COLLECTED CRITICAL ESSAYS from the library though I am fearful, fearful, fearful of it.

A triumph indeed
An incredible poem by a passionate and erudite poet. Written in 150 sections over 82 pages, the Triumph of Love is a poem about memory; the memory of those who have gone before us, have suffered, have made sacrifices, and the ways in which violence is done to them through the forgetting of those living today. The reader will certainly want a dictionary and encyclopedia nearby for the numerous references to historical and literary figures and the many obscure (but irreplaceable) words!

I read it through once myself, and then went back again slowly, then again looking up all the references. Each time I found new appreciation and love for this poem. It is at times beautifully lyrical, coarse, bitingly satirical, but overwhelmingly, in Hill's own words, "a sad and angry consolation". If you are familiar with Hill's other poems, you will certainly enjoy this ride. If not, you may wish to start with some of Hill's earlier works, which are also wonderful (in his "Collected Poems").

Ho, ho, ho.
Geoffrey Hill's new poem is - amongst other things - an enormous "blague": "a satire upon stupidity...a weapon of the intelligence at bay". A comedy (commedia) in the fullest sense, it ispacked with excruciating in-jokes, false leads and obscurities whose verypurpose seems to be to satirize the insistance of our media culture oninstantaneous public "accessibility". Half intimate portrait,half erudite "gotcha", the poem is by turns dazzling,exasperating and *very* funny: a prize for the patient and demandingreader, and a wet haddock in the face for everyone else (critics andacademics included). ... Read more

Product Description
The Collected Critical Writings gathers more than forty years of Hill's published criticism, in a revised final form, and also adds much new work. It will serve as the canonical volume of criticism by Hill, the pre-eminent poet-critic whom A. N. Wilson has called "probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose." In his criticism Hill ranges widely, investigating both poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley). He is also steeped in the historical context - political, poetic, and religious - of the writers he studies. Most importantly, he brings texts and contexts into new and telling relations, neither reducing texts to the circumstances of their utterance nor imagining that they can float free of them. A number of the essays have already established themselves as essential reading on particular subjects, such as his analysis of Vaughan's "The Night", his discussion of Gurney's poetry, and his critical account of The Oxford English Dictionary. Others confront the problems of language and the nature of value directly, as in "Our Word is Our Bond", "Language, Suffering, and Value", and "Poetry and Value". In all his criticism, Hill reveals literature to be an essential arena of civic intelligence. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"Alienated Majesty"
is a phrase from Thoreau which Hill considers as a springboard in the final group of essays in this volume (essays addressing poetics of Emerson, Hopkins, Eliot, and Whitman, among others).

While I'm thrilled to have Hill's essays all in one place as reference, I admit, they are weary going. I certainly agree with the first reviewer: the terse, compressed language of these essays makes Hill's poetry appear in its true form: seriously beautiful poetry. Modern readers who complain over the difficulty of Hill's poetry need not bother with this volume, in this collection, Hill is intertextual on a very serious level with English history, prose, and poetry; the weight of Hill's intellectual background and a lifetime of academia have a heavy hand to play in the text, as should be expected.

If you want insight into Hill's intellectual process without reading his critical writings, it can be done. I recommend Eliot's selected essays (a volume Hill has owned since his youth), Hopkins' poetry (but especially his journals and letters), and of course get you to some Milton (especially his political sonnets & prose tracts, and his "masque" or play "Comus").

Good luck.

A Complex but Decent Respect for Language
Students of Hill should know that there is much in this "Collected" that does not appear in his previously published volumes.It is dense and tough going (and has the virtue of making Hill's great poetry appear pellucid).However, the rewards are great if one reads the prose in the same way one would read the poetry -- pausing after the difficult sentences, struggling with the references, working through the knots.I find the newer, previously unpublished work more congenial than the earlier essays.Just as Hill seems to have discovered a new kind of fluency in his poetry in the '90s, so too his prose seems more reader-friendly.Hill stands to the second half of the 20th century as Yeats stands to the first; they are the poet-theorists one returns to.In both cases, it is the poetry that is truly imperishable, but it is the prose that provides a glimpse into the workshop whence the poetry emanates. ... Read more

Product Description
In the words of the magazine Poetry Review, a kind of late fury has gripped Geoffrey Hill in recent years after a decade's silence, with CANAAN (1996), THE LOVE TRIUMPH (1998), SPEECH! SPEECH! (2001) - all published in Penguin - and now this new volume. All these books are driven by a profound quarrel with the modern world. This new book consists of 72 numbered poems, each of 24 lines. Together they make up a kind of Dantean eclogue in which the landscape of Hill's youth - rural Worcestershire - offers a glimpse of paradise in the midst of the modern world. This is a major poet writing serious, beautiful poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Latest installment from the maestro of contemporary verse
A meditation on immortality, memory, and poetry: all this should be familiar to readers of Geoffrey Hill's poetry. Orchards is the third book-long poem Hill has produced in the past five years, and, even more so than the first two, must be read in conjunction with his earlier work to be fully appreciated and understood. (First time readers of Hill would be better advised to turn to his "New and Collected Poems," or "The Triumph of Love" for a starting point).

Once again (the other time was in "Speech! Speech!") Hill forgoes the sweeping lyricism of "The Triumph of Love" in favor of a focus on pitch rather than tone (think of Hopkins). At times, awkward, flailing about, reaching and overreaching, or falling short, "The Orchards of Syon" nevertheless achieves at moments a poignancy and precision that rewards close (very close) readings.

Hill was born in 1932 in England, but now teaches at Boston University; his topics are 16th/17th c. English poetry, but also Hopkins and 20th century poetry, and he is "Professor of Religion and Literature". Unsurprisingly then, this poem delves into the question of Augustine vs Pelagius; Bradwardine vs Ockham, that is to say, divine will vs human "free" will.

Beware, this is dense stuff, and will require time and effort to be unpacked, unravelled, understood. It is a poem to be read over years, not days or months. As Hill writes in section VIII:

The curlew's pitch distracts us from her nest.
But: end this for all in some shape other
than vexed bafflement; each triangular
wall-cope cladded with tight moss
springy as a terrier's pelt, buttonhole
emerald polypodae, sprung tremblers
within the burring air of the fell?

Amen to that, I say. ... Read more

Product Description
Why is a cardinal red or a bluebird blue? Why do some birds have plumage that is intensely colored—is it pigment, light, gender, robust health, or some combination of all four? What roles do disease, climate, and wear and tear play in this process? What does feather display signal about sexual attraction and social status? How has color camouflage evolved?

These are just a few of the fascinating questions explored here in the first non-academic work on coloration and plumage, and their key role in avian life. More than 200 gorgeous photographs highlight the explanations of the essentials: what color is, ornithologically speaking; how it is produced and measured; how birds use color to attract mates and deter competitors; how birds perceive color; and how coloration varies across species by sex, season, and age.

Geoff Hill guides his readers along an engaging but authoritative narrative illustrated with vivid photographs and fact-packed captions. A book conceived in the same spirit as National Geographic’s more traditional bird guides, it’s sure to appeal to serious ornithologists, recreational bird watchers, and natural history buffs alike. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Perfect for any general lending library strong on wildlife exploration
Bird Coloration offers an analysis of how birds are colored: why some have plumage, what roles diseases and climate play, and how feathers display signals. This is the first non-academic exploration and pairs over 200 gorgeous photos with an easy exploration of bird coloration perfect for any general lending library strong on wildlife exploration.

Wow.Well written, very wide range of fascinating topics, and stunningphotography
If you have an interest in either birding or color or photograhy or art or biology or genetics or animal behavior or natural history or if you are just a curious person by nature, then there is something for you in this book. While the underlying theme is bird coloration, Geoffrey Hill covers a nice space around this topic with a style that is easy to read and continuously fascinating. As I read I kept saying "wow", and "realy?!??" and "so *that's* how they figured that out".The photography is phenominal and there are beautiful color pictures on almost evey page.The printing is exceptional - colorful and tac sharp.Almost all of the pictures have rich, descriptive captions.For example, on page 118 there is a hillarious picture of an Egyptian Vulture where the second sentence of the description reads "To get the careotenoids needed for facial coloration, these vultures eat the gut contents of dead sheep."The face even looks like something from the gut of a dead sheep.

The author covers color vision in birds and compares it to human vision (birds see many more colors than humans), the genetics of color, structures that create color, pigments, behaviours influenced by color, even color beyond the birds themselves - the White-winged Fairy-wrens in Australia brings a blue flower during courtship.For a different use of color, the Variable Pitohue of New Guinea is colorful to warn preditors - it has the same poison in its skin and feathers as dart frogs.

The author explains the history of how scientists came to know many of the things they know about bird behaviour and bird coloring, which adds to the already fascinating content.

I can't think of any negatives to the book.

... Read more

Product Description
This collection of essays by one of today's major English-language poets ranges across the history of poetry and criticism from Shakespeare's time to the present day. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

First book of criticism by one of the great living poets
Hill's first collection of critical writings is an important contribution to the field of 16th and 17th century literary studies, as well as being indispensible for students of Hill's own poetic works. Despite his current obscurity, which is wholly undeserved, Hill is perhaps the greatest living poet writing in the English language and has been so recognized by a wide range of critics. In 20th century letters, he is on par with Pound and Eliot, and stands above Auden and many others. Time will recognize this in due course -- too often the great artists of an age only come to be appreciated in the next.

Hill's second volume of criticism is "The Enemy's Country", still available, and a third volume will be forthcoming. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Gotta love the title
Geoffrey Hill's characteristic attitude towards things, a sort of disarming grumpiness, is less evident in this volume than in the previous few. The book is still somewhat daunting, and much of it is both obscure (e.g. the reader is invited to overhear Hill talking to himself about Burke) and rhythmically inert. But there are several good poems. My favorites are the poems about Wyatt, and the beautiful one about Ben Jonson's "Masques" (note: if you don't recognize these names, you probably shouldn't waste your time on this book) --

"I see Inigo Jones's great arches
in my mind's eye, his water-inky clouds,
the paraphernalia of a royal masque;
dung and detritus in the crazy streets,
the big coaches bellying in their skirts
pothole to pothole, and the men of fire,
the link-boys slouching and the rainy wind."

Another poem I like is "Coda," which begins like this --

"Shredded--my kite--in the myriad-snagged
crabapple crown, the cane cross-piece flailing;
a dark wind visible even deep in the hedge.
I knew then how much my eros
was emptiness, thorn-fixed on desolation,"

And then there's this memorable and much-quoted bit from the "title poem" ("A Precis, or Memorandum, of C.P.") --

"The watered gold that February drains
out of the overcast...
the snowdrop fettled on its hinge, waxwings
becoming sportif in the grimy air."

I could go on excerpting the good bits -- which are not entirely unrepresentative; if you're patient and reasonably interested in English history, this book is worth your time. If not, Hill has written books that are _primarily_ about other things, which you might prefer ("The Triumph of Love" about WW2, "Mercian Hymns" about the Anglo-Saxons, "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy" about Charles Peguy, etc.).

Also, Hill's early poems -- up through "Tenebrae" (1978) -- are significantly more inviting than his later ones. If you haven't read those, you should, especially "Mercian Hymns." ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Examines Hill's verse within the context of British and American reaction to the great literary modernists of the early 20th century
... Read more

Product Description
Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry 'recognises that words fail us'. These essays explore Hill's struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. He is a poet of phenomenal verbal power who knows the dangers of indulging such power. His poetry draws to light the greatest intimacies and the most stunning and fleeting of his apprehensions. It is also public in its contemplation of ethics, history and politics. His ear for public discourse ranges from seventeenth-century politics and theology to the nightly news and the celebrity-spread. This book seeks to show how all his work is marked by the quest for the right pitch of utterance whether it is sorrowing, angry, satiric or erotic. It shows how Hill's words are never lightly 'acceptable' but an ethical act, how he seeks out words he can stand by - words that are 'getting it right'.'Acceptable words' begins with an overview essay covering themes and styles across Hill's entire career, followed by a series of essays on the different volumes in chronological order of their first appearance up to 'Scenes from Comus' (2005), concluding with a short 'Afterword'.The book also includes discussion of some poems yet to appear in book form.This book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date critical work on Geoffrey Hill yet to appear. It aims to contribute something to the understanding of his poetry among those who have followed it for many years and students and other readers encountering this major poet for the first time. ... Read more

Product Description

This study focuses on the post-Holocaust writers Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, and Ted Hughes, while also stressing the links between their work and the Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan, Miklos Radnoti, Primo Levi, and Janos Pilinszky.

Developing his theory of "awkwardness," Antony Rowland argues that post-Holocaust poetry can play an important part in our understanding of Holocaust writing. Rowland examines post-Holocaust poetry's self-conscious, imaginative engagement with the Holocaust, as well as the literature of survivors. He illuminates how "awkward" poetics enable post-Holocaust poets to provide ethical responses to history and avoid aesthetic prurience. This probing and sensitive reassessment of Holocaust-related poetry offers an important new perspective on postwar poetry.

Product Description
Defending Poetry studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet-critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. It begins with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas and continues by situating these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also as drastically other.This otherness is bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career-long contemplation of the ideal of poetic 'integrity', and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
Here is public poetry of uncommon moral urgency: it bears witness to the sufferings of the innocent at the hands of history and to the martyrdom of those who have dared look history in the eye. "Rich, quarrelsome...handsome and brutish...Hill's poetry is the major achievement of late-twentieth-century verse," says The New Criterion. "Canaan is one of the few serious books we will have to mark the millennium."Amazon.com Review
The Washington Post Book World refers to the"sensuality and coiled force" of Geoffrey Hill's poetry, andDonald Hallcalls him "the best English poet of the twentieth century."In this collection, Hill takes on the role of prophet and witness,expressing outrage over England's recent history and politics. Thereis a deeper resonance in the writing, too, which is alluded to in thetitle. Hill suggests that most of human history and politics iscorrupt and inhumane, and he is angry. Hill's is powerful writing thatmarries the earthly and the spiritual. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Hill at His Most Opaque
I'm a great fan of Hill's work--the Mercian Hymns, for instance--and of the Blakean early poetry, but this book, I think, is Geoffrey Hill at his worst.I say he is at his worst, not because of the allusions and the lack of notes that allow us inside the particular cloister he inhabits (the culture allows us to uncover such things), but because he fails the first obligation of all poets, and that is to the mother tongue.We do not find the old burly force of Hill at his best, but instead encounter effete language, lost in a perfumed cloud of erudition.Lacking memorable language, we search for mastery of poetic form, but even that is denied us.Hill sticks to a kind of slack, unrhymed counting of syllables, and we are all the worst for it.Go back, Geoffrey Hill, to the vernacular.Tell us more about that grandmother who made nails for a living, and leave the dons to their obscurity, and the priests to find God among the worm-casings and the dust.Look at the best of R.S. Thomas, if you need to see again.Look again, for God's sake, at William Blake before you sit down with your editor at Penguin.

reading and wrestling
Despite the extreme difficulty of these award-winning poems--difficulty for which Geoffrey Hill, considered by some to be England's greatest
living poet, is notorious--I like them very much.And there I find myself hoist on my own petard, having frequently raged against the
obscurantism of authors like James Joyce, but now endorsing a poet who is nearly as impenetrable at times.So, first, let me acknowledge that
I am willing to forgive more from Mr. Hill because I favor his dark moral/religious/political take on modern England, than I would be from
someone who was just being obscure for obscurity's sake, say Joyce or Pynchon.Second, I do think we, justifiably, tend to give poets more
leeway than novelists; after all, by the very effort they have to put in to achieving a chiseled brevity they earn some right to ask a little more
effort of us readers.The nearly forty poems here do not fill even eighty pages, so if you have to read them once or twice, or ten times, it
doesn't seem as onerous a task as trudging through hundreds of densely printed pages of a novel.

Mr. Hill's themes and methods are signaled early on, in the title of the collection and in the epigraph :

...So ye children of Israel did wickedly in the
sight of the Lord, & forgate the Lord their God,
& serued Baalim, and Asheroth ... Yea, they
offred their sonnes, and their daughters vnto
diuels, And shed innocent blood, euen the blood
of their soones, and of their daughters, whome
they offred vnto the idols of Canaan, and the
land they defiled with blood.Thus were they
steined with their owne inuentions ... o
Canaan, the land of the Philistims, I wil euen
destroy thee without an inhabitant.

Judges 3:7; Psalm 106: 37-9; Zephaniah 2:5
(from the Geneva Bible of 1560)

The Geneva Bible of 1560?Okay, so he's delving back into the past, to a vibrant and impassioned form of ruggedly fundamentalist
Protestantism and a Bible written by Brits in exile (note that Professor Hill himself is and has been at Boston University); comparing modern
England to ancient Canaan, and casting himself in the role of doomsayer.The reader has been warned.

Here's an example of one of the more accessible pieces :

DARK-LAND

Wherein Wesley stood
up from his father's grave,
summoned familiar dust
for strange salvation:

whereto England rous'd,
ignorant, her inane
Midas-like hunger: smoke
engrossed, cloud-encumbered,

a spectral people
raking among the ash;
its freedom a lost haul
of entailed riches.

I've no idea who Wesley and his father are, though I assume it's John Wesley (1703-91), the founder of Methodism, but can tell you that this
bleak vision taps into three of Mr. Hill's favorite themes : of England as having become excessively materialistic, even hedonistic; of
hard-won British liberty as a thing of the past; and of post-War Europe as an ash heap.That much I think I follow.

Or consider just two of the images from a poem, most of which I didn't understand, DE JURE BELLI AC PACIS, which is written in memory
of Hans-Bernd von Haeften, who plotted against murder and was executed in 1944.The first :

Could none predict these haughty degradations
as now your high-strung
martyred resistance serves
to consecrate the liberties of Maastricht.

followed later by :

To the high-minded
base-metal forgers of this common Europe,
community of parody, you stand ec-
centric as a prophet.

Even without being able to follow every elusive allusion in the poem, and without knowing anything of von Haeften, you can easily discern
the message that Mr. Hill is contemptuous of the new European Union, based solely on economic integration, with no thought given to the
unlikelihood of ever turning these disparate nations into a genuine community, and little regard given to the surrender of sovereignty and
freedom it will require.

Even if you are unmoved by the specter of England subjugating itself to French and German bureaucrats and indifferent to the economism of
modern British society, you may have trouble figuring out why Geoffrey Hill sounds so angry, so much at times like an Old Testament
prophet.But think on this quote from Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor :

It does seem in our countries in Britain today, especially in England and Wales, that Christianity, as a sort of backdrop to people's lives
and moral decisions - and to the Government, the social life of the country - has now almost been vanquished.

or this one from Dr. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury :

A tacit atheism prevails. Death is assumed to be the end of life, bleak though that thought is. If we need hope to clutch to our breast at all
it will be in such greatly scaled down forms, such as our longings for family happiness, the next holiday or personal fulfilment. Our
concentration on the here and now renders thoughts of eternity irrelevant.

All of which brings us back to the Biblical Canaan, where the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and so were sold into slavery.Simply
as a literary matter, Geoffrey Hill's poems here are a powerful evocation of the idea that something similar is happening now to England and
the British people, that they have become a post-Christian and demoralized society.And if, like me, you agree with the specific charges he
levels here, however oblique the terms in which he couches them, then you'll like the book very much and be honored to put some effort into
reading it and wrestling with his meanings.

GRADE : A-

The after-life of the elegy
The sequence "De Jure Belli ac Pacis" ("of the laws of war and peace": the title of a work by Hugo Grotius) in this volume is oneof the finest things Hill has written: an elegy which branches between theprivate and the public voice, accusing the "high-minded / base-metalforgers of this common Europe, / community of parody" at the same timeas it laments the loss of what "[w]e might have kept" of the morehumble, inhibited high-mindedness of the poem's dedicatee, Hans-Bernd vonHaeften (a member of the Kreisau circle of conspirators againstHitler).

The poem asks whether the "witness" of those who stoodnot only against Hitler but against the politics of Hitlerism ("wildreasons of the state", as Hill's poem on Bonhoeffer has it) is safe inEurope's keeping, when its tributes to the murdered conspirators"compound with Cicero's maxims, Schiller's chant" (Beethoven'sOde to Joy, presumably) the silencing of von Haeften's "silencedverities". More ominously, it speaks of the "new depths ofinvention" to which the Nazis sank in the torture and execution ofmembers of the Kreisau circle, suggesting that the bestiality of the SS isanother part of the disavowed inheritence of modern Europe. Theinterrogators played records of children singing folk music to drown outthe screams of their captives; does not our culture also have recourse to"children's / songs to mask torture" (cf Benigni's _La Vita e'Bella_)?

Not all of _Canaan_ is as good as this. Hill's "Psalms ofAssize", for instance, read like marginalia on marginalia,simultaneously clenched and lyrical: the "singable remainder" ofa calcinated theology, perhaps, but too brittle to last in the reader'simagination. But much of the volume is more than worth sticking with. Thepoems are more often than not about the disappearance of their ownreferents - "the names / and what they have about them dark todark" ("Sobieski's Shield") - but this is the very oppositeof a willed obscurity: Hill's language calls after lost things into thedarkness into which they have fallen, and sometimes manages to recover"lost footage, / achieve too late prescient telegraphy" (anothername for 20/20 hindsight?). Perhaps this marks Hill ineradicably as agrumpy old modernist: whilst other poets, other poetics, have devotedthemselves to exploring and even celebrating the contingency of languageand meaning, _Canaan_ remains anachronistically committed to an elegiacmode. But in fact its particular glory is that it shows what the elegy canbe and go on being even amid a society and culture besotted with theevanescent and continually on the make, yet afflicted with a deep andinscrutable nostalgia for a loss it has little way of knowing how toconfront.

The after-life of the elegy
The sequence "De Jure Belli ac Pacis" ("of the laws of war and peace": the title of a work by Hugo Grotius) in this volume is oneof the finest things Hill has written: an elegy which branches between theprivate and the public voice, accusing the "high-minded / base-metalforgers of this common Europe, / community of parody" at the same timeas it laments the loss of what "[w]e might have kept" of the morehumble, inhibited high-mindedness of the poem's dedicatee, Hans-Bernd vonHaeften (a member of the Kreisau circle of conspirators againstHitler).

The poem asks whether the "witness" of those who stoodnot only against Hitler but against the politics of Hitlerism ("wildreasons of the state", as Hill's poem on Bonhoeffer has it) is safe inEurope's keeping, when its tributes to the murdered conspirators"compound with Cicero's maxims, Schiller's chant" (Beethoven'sOde to Joy, presumably) the silencing of von Haeften's "silencedverities". More ominously, it speaks of the "new depths ofinvention" to which the Nazis sank in the torture and execution ofmembers of the Kreisau circle, suggesting that the bestiality of the SS isanother part of the disavowed inheritence of modern Europe. Theinterrogators played records of children singing folk music to drown outthe screams of their captives; does not our culture also have recourse to"children's / songs to mask torture" (cf Benigni's _La Vita e'Bella_)?

Not all of _Canaan_ is as good as this. Hill's "Psalms ofAssize", for instance, read like marginalia on marginalia,simultaneously clenched and lyrical: the "singable remainder" ofa calcinated theology, perhaps, but too brittle to last in the reader'simagination. But much of the volume is more than worth sticking with. Thepoems are more often than not about the disappearance of their ownreferents - "the names / and what they have about them dark todark" ("Sobieski's Shield") - but this is the very oppositeof a willed obscurity: Hill's language calls after lost things into thedarkness into which they have fallen, and sometimes manages to recover"lost footage, / achieve too late prescient telegraphy" (anothername for 20/20 hindsight?). Perhaps this marks Hill ineradicably as agrumpy old modernist: whilst other poets, other poetics, have devotedthemselves to exploring and even celebrating the contingency of languageand meaning, _Canaan_ remains anachronistically committed to an elegiacmode. But in fact its particular glory is that it shows what the elegy canbe and go on being even amid a society and culture besotted with theevanescent and continually on the make, yet afflicted with a deep andinscrutable nostalgia for a loss it has little way of knowing how toconfront. ... Read more

Product Description
A new book-length poem from "the strongest British poet now alive." -Harold Bloom.

Excruciatingly comic, Speech! Speech! is also that rarest of things: atour de force that is tragic. As imperious as the King, foreverissuing commands, and as perilously ingenious in rejoinder as theFool, the voices of Geoffrey Hill vie to outjest each other-outrageeach other-yet also to soothe implacable injuries. Whose injuries,exactly? To some degree (third degree), the poet's own-but not hisalone, yours too, gentle reader. In its ferocity and love, in itsglimpses of timeless beauty, even in the praises it bestows (upon thesavage farce of Daumier, or the dear measure of Holst, or theclear-eyed endurance of Balzac), it is a supreme "how to" book. How tobe (or at least how to begin the process of being) honest. In speech,for a start. With a poem for each of the 120 days of Sodom, it may gotoo far-but then, as T.S. Eliot said, it is only by going too far thatyou find out how far you can go. This is History (and yet howdifferent from Robert Lowell's unrolling) and these are Dream Songs(and as nightmarishly just as John Berryman's visions). Notself-expression, but self-explosion. A challenge to all concerned. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

a difficult customer
I think this book is aggressively critical in tone. In it, the author has a succession of negative things to say about the modern world. He especially does not like the media. He criticises musical forms like rap which he does not seem to know very much about. On the other hand, the book has quite a lot of memorable phrases, and sometimes it can make you laugh. It is the kind of book which leaves the reader with very mixed feelings.

difficult genius
The man is brilliant, but so difficult to get through. I would suggest having a handy reference section nearby. He has a beautiful way with words. The current volume is one long poem, divided into sections (in a similar way to "The Triumph of Love").

Hill will definitely become more widely appreciated as time wears on...

A deep, disturbing work of poetry
Geoffrey Hill is truly a poet's poet. His work is highly intellectual, peppered with references, and tersely worded. Behind the imposing verbal front, however, one finds a vast expanse of wry, analytical intelligence and an immense compassion for his fellow man. "Speech! Speech!" is Hill's newest book, which he describes as his "Inferno"; with his usual erudition and wit (as well as a fair amount of introspection), Hill examines the state of the media in today's world, and his relationship to it. His words tear through such topics as the death of Princess Diana, the BBC in his childhood, and the prevelence of rap. "Speech! Speech!" is a volume both of dissent and of hope; at times brutally honest, unbearably ugly, it is at the same time a testament to the redeeming and timeless power of poetry.

Bug'rit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
"Speech! Speech!" continues much in the mode of "The Triumph of Love": praise and lament "in different voices", a polyphonous essay into the stresses and strengths of the English language, its potential for wrought honesty as well as casual deception.

The poem's ethical obsession is with pitch, as opposed to tone: the making and upholding, in language, of difficult distinctions as opposed to - so far as it can be held distinct from - the equitable imperative smoothing-over of disputes and differends (the "healing" snake-oil of much contemporary political rhetoric). In illustration of this, as in obedience to it, "Speech! Speech!" bristles with split hairs. The defamatory satirical genius of the poem lies in its outrageous conflations, a wit that works insidiously, like guilt, by association. But its moral animus ("animus is what I home on, even as to pitch" - section 90) is focussed on those parts of speech where one is surprised to see distinctions being made, or remade - surprised that they should (still) be thought or seen to matter.

There are many places in the poem where it becomes difficult, important, to ascertain what is being driven at, from what angle (or angles) and with what force. So, in section 57, the speaker beckons:

Show you something. Shakespeare's elliptical late syntax renders clear the occlusions, calls us to account...

The reader of "Speech! Speech!" is similarly drawn to the places where Hill's elliptical verse indicates, but does not show, unaccounted-for ommissions, exclusions, losses. We are ordered to "[j]udge the distance" between generations, to take the measure of what Hill sees as the abrupt - overnight - pillage and erasure of a common heritage - "common" in a sense to be distinguished from, but not opposed to, that of "demotic". This is arguable, of course, and the poem argues with itself about it, about the meaning of "democracy" and the condescension of "the egalitarian anti-elitist SUN" (a widely-circulated British newspaper, whose language Hill parodies passim). Nevertheless, Hill seems genuinely shocked by the way that English culture has changed over the past fifty years, and is clearly contemptuous of the ability of electronic databases and the "world-surfing quote research / unquote of your average junk maestro" (cheers!) to replace the "forms of understanding, far from despicable, / and furthest now, as they are most despised" he celebrated in "The Triumph of Love" (section CXIX). His argument may be judged reactionary, but it is passionately made.

I have found it difficult to receive the verses of "Speech! Speech!" as Hill says they were intended - as praise-songs. What is being praised is presumably the faculty the poem itself aspires to, that of fashioning a language fit for human use out of the "acoustic din" of an indifferent mass culture. Or, rather, what is both praised and petitioned by "Speech! Speech!" is that part of ourselves that might find a use for such a language, that is too proud and attentive to be satisfied with less - that is healthy enough to curse. But sheer celebratory delight (not, for once, miscalled) is achieved only in brief epiphanic flushes, as if by concession: for the most part the dominant, almost ineluctable mood of the poem is one of sadness and anger.

"Speech! Speech!" is a poem to spend time with - more time than I have spent so far. Notice is given on the inside sleeve that it is a "tour de force", and I would not dissent from that; however, there is much about it that will not come immediately, and may not come at all until the last measures of one's own reading (such is the messianic hope of interpretation). Off you go, then... ... Read more

Product Description
SCENES FROM COMUS is the new sequence of poems from Britain's most original and ferocious modern prophet, Geoffrey Hill. In the words of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Hill remains for me the supreme voice of the last few decades The recent work, telegraphic, angry and unconsoled, at once assertive and self-dispossessing, is extraordinary' ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Second edition evidently needed...
This is one of Hill's most brilliant and beautiful works. Also his language relaxes some, almost in tribute to Milton's language in Comus. Critics love to quote this book, which says something about the accessibility of the work. But philosophically, theologically, linguistically, this book is such a treat. If you have any book from Hill's later work, have this book. If it's too pricey in its current edition, buy Hill's Selected Poems, which contain a hefty portion of Scenes from Comus. ... Read more

Product Description
The last documented sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker--one of the rarest and most intriguing animals in the world--was noted over 50 years ago. Long thought to be extinct, the 2005 announcement of a sighting in Arkansas sparked tremendous enthusiasm and hope that this species could yet be saved. But the subsequent failure of a massive search to relocate Ivorybills in Arkansas made hope for the species' revival short-lived.
Here, noted ornithologist Geoffrey Hill tells the story of how he and two of his colleagues stumbled upon what may be a breeding population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the swamps of northern Florida. He relates their laborious attempts to document irrefutable evidence for the existence of this shy, elusive bird following the failure of a much larger research team to definitively prove the bird's existence.
Hill tells of his travails both in and out of the vast swamp wilderness, pulling back the curtain to reveal the little-seen political maneuvering that is part of all modern science. He explains how he and his group decided who to exclude or include as their findings came in, and why they felt the need to keep their search a secret. Hill returns repeatedly to how expectations can guide observations, and how tempting it is to oversell evidence in the face of the struggle between an overwhelming desire to find the bird and the need to retain integrity and objectivity.
Written like a good detective story, Ivorybill Hunters also delves into the science behind the rediscovery of a species, explaining how professional ornithologists follow up on a sight record of a rare bird, and how this differs from the public's perception of how scientists actually work. Hill notes the growing role of amateurs in documenting bird activity and discusses how the community of birders and nature lovers can see, enjoy, and help preserve these birds.
Ivorybill Hunters will prove a fascinating read for those with an interest in natural history, adventure, environmental conservation, and science, as well as the more than forty-six million Americans who now call themselves birdwatchers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

The search continues..............
I was very pleased with this book and I found it most informative. I have always believed that it will be either hunters or other outdoors people who will document this bird's continued existence. It was also nice to see that someone was searching in Florida. Florida and the Big Thicket in Texas strike me as two promising areas. As a kayaker myself I can only imagine the exhiliration of seeing one of these birds in the wild.

IVORYBILL HUNTERS
I BOUGHT THIS BOOK FOR MY HUSBAND (TED), WHO HAS GONE ON TWO GREAT ADVENTURES LOOKING FOR THIS MYSTERY BIRD, ONCE IN ARK. AND ONCE IN FL.
TED SAID THE BOOK WAS A STEP BY STEP TAIL OF WHAT HE AND HIS FRIEND
(GREG)EXPERIENCED,SAME LOCATION (IN FLORIDA).ALTHOUGH GREG HEARD THE BIRD HE NEVER SAW IT.
I AM SO SURE THERE WILL BE ANOTHER ADVENTURE SOME WHERE IN THE NEAR FUTURE.
JEAN/DEVOTED WIFE

Exciting but we need real proof
No one was more excited by the possible ivorybill rediscovery than I was back in 2004. When I read that headline, I am quite sure that I jumped a mile out of my seat, and will always remember where I was at the time! But I also believed that any day, within a week, a month, a year, or whatever, some indisputable evidence would be presented, yet sadly this never seems to have occurred. To be sure, in this book Dr. Hill does everything but take us by the hand to the exact place where his team made their sightings, and we are shown various pictures of huge possible nest holes in some trees that conceivably could be the work of ivorybills. But the general public, as well as people like myself who, quite frankly, have only dreamed of seeing that bird for their entire lives without daring to believe it might be possible, deserve a little more convincing evidence than just word of mouth to keep their hopes alive for the bird's possible survival.

Die-hard fans of this flamboyant bird, myself included, can just never quite relinquish the romantic hope of being able to walk into a patch of the bird's swampy forest habitat one quiet evening, and to encounter one of these creatures, gazing balefully down with its big yellow eyes from its perch high up on a moss-draped branch of a giant baldcypress tree. However, it is important to realize that this species has, or had, some strict habitat requirements that were seriously compromised when its primeval forest home was literally cut out from under it. The chances that this species has actually managed to survive are therefore extremely slim at best, and the burden of proof is on those who claim they have actually seen it. The rest of us need to either move on or finally have some real cause for hope.

Alas, life is not like a reality show, and we can't always have the happy ending we crave. Unfortunately, Dr. Hill and his team are making sightings that no other person has yet been able to independently corroborate. I don't think they are deliberately trying to mislead anyone, but rather they probably want so badly to see ivorybills that they think they are seeing them when they are really seeing pileateds, anhingas, ibises, wood ducks, or whatever, flashing by at dusk in the dim light of the forest, and believing they spotted something that was not really there, except in their fondest hopes and dreams!

I liked the book somewhat because I felt that it was an honest attempt to locate a population of these birds, but feel vaguely frustrated at the apparent failure of the author and his team to present any real, indisputable proof. I was left feeling quite baffled by some of their assumptions about what they were really seeing, yet a little curious too. Somehow I find their conclusions difficult to believe, yet secretly hope they might be right! If you want an interesting read about their research, check out this book, but you will probably be left with similar feelings.

Optimistic News for the Ivory-bill
After the discouraging results at relocating (finding) the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas in 2005 this book is a welcome source of optimistic news.Professor Hill is a good writer and his account of Auburn University's search for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Florida is a satisfying read not just for the possible good news but also as an enjoyable vicarious adventure into the cypress tupelo forest where the birds may be found.

There may not be the glossy 8x10 picture of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker at its nest cavity yet but read this and you will be encouraged.In addition to the exciting accounts of encounters with Ivory-bills, their drumming and calls, I found the details of foraging sites and the specific Ivory-billed wood peeling method and bill adaptation of interest.

The author and search group have a website and will continue to update sightings there.This book will give you the background on the discovery and exploration of the impressive cypress/tupelo/oak forest along the Choctawhatchee River that may be a refuge of the Ivory-billed and a source for more good news to come.

good story, but where is the proof?
I think this book needs to be reviewed on two levels: first is this a good, honest, readable book, and then second is their credible evidence for the Ivorybilled woodpecker presented?

Dr. Hill writes in an open manner that makes the account of the search readable.There are stories of alligators, a stolen kayak, and almost being lost in a remote area. I think he is honest in presenting what he thinks he saw and his motives ... I don't think if he was being open, he would state that his group a panther in North Florida (they are not known to occur there).He also is willing to state his motives, even if not completely honorable (to do a better job that the Cornell team and to have a southern team find a southern bird). On this account, it is ironic that he criticized Cornell on their evidence, when he offers little more. In one short chapter, whose purpose seems to increase his own credibility,he dismisses the experience of locals (who had never reported them) as well as the more systematic Florida Breeding Bird Atlas.Hill is quite open about mistakes made and opportunities missed.

As a book (and his published scientific article) that tries to present evidence it is not all that convincing (and he himself states this is not proof).As Carl Sagan said "Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proof".Although he argues that the Ivorybilled in Florida are different than those that were in the Singer tract, he does not seem willing to accept that Pileated Woodpeckers may have variability in cavity size or behavior. The circle showing the ivory billed on page 232 could be any black and white (however somewhat better images are published on the Auburn web site). The reader is really left with little evidence to examine other than the word of a few good observers.The reader is also left to ponder, whether Hill rushed to publish this book and findings, just as he criticized the Cornell team.For the skeptic there are some nice blogs on the Ivorybill as well as important paper by Jerome Jackson.
... Read more