The Orchards of Syon

From "the finest British poet of our time" (John Hollander), a blank-verse meditation on the mystery of grace-and the capstone to a decade-long poetic project.

"Hill is probably the best writer alive, in prose or rhyme, in the English language.... He manages-in a manner unrivalled since Yeats-to make phrases, to mythologize our predicament, to speak for us." --A. N. Wilson, Daily Telegraph

The fourth book of poems by Geoffrey Hill to appear since 1996, this is the final installment of the remarkable series that began with Canaan and continued with The Triumph of Love and Speech! Speech! Read together, these four books-each a distinct and complete aesthetic achievement-form a single great poem, a kind of high-modernist Divine Comedy that is at once a prophetic judgment on man's fallen state and a sad and angry consolation. The Orchards of Syon is Hill's Paradiso, a Dantean eclogue in which the natural world, and the dream-state of our earthly existence, offer glimpses into Paradise. Having cut us to the quick in his previous books, Hill now heals us with the balm of his own language, and in doing so remakes the devotional poem for our times.