Particularly to American readers, Geoffrey Hill's poetry may seem slightly anachronistic. Providing perspective on history, with perspective which is itself historical, the poems provide a striking contrast to much contemporary American poetry with its emphasis on the present moment or on the poet's past but only as far back as his own childhood. The poems are not about the world we already know but about some of what we should know—what we should remember—if we are to gain imaginative perspective on our contemporary situation. The poetry comes out of a sense of communal relationship—of the past and the present, of one human being and another, of a person and his God—and it is deeply ethical. The mark of Hill's integrity is his acceptance of the pain involved in examining the forces of historical process and of religious imagination that break apart the contingency of...