Description
Book Synopsis'Over 32 poems Geoffrey Hill traces an elegiac sequence for William Lawes and his music, intermingling the historical events around his death with flashes of the everyday. The result is a collection that delights in eccentric incongruities. Ben Jonson will appear a line after a popular instant coffee blend has been mentioned, Dante will be found next to a mime artist, Marcel Marceau, and Lawes himself figures auditioning for Ronnie Scott. Mr Hill actively seeks out such juxtapositions. He will audaciously rhyme "haruspex", an Etruscan soothsayer who saw prophecies in the entrails of victims, with "bad sex", his poetry delighting in "a dissonance to make them wince". Yet, as Mr Hill writes, when speaking of Lawes's tendency to jar different musical themes, "the grace of music is its dissonance." This discordance is part of his wider belief in the public nature of poetry. Refusing to be a "light entertainer" like the hypocrites in Dante's inferno, Mr Hill presents a difficult world as he sees it. His gift lies in making such difficulty momentarily understood.' THE ECONOMIST
Trade Review"Clavics is wonderful for its sense of play in language and in time: words collapsing into other words, times collapsing into other times. Such play amounts at its best to what Hill himself calls 'wit let tipple into Grace'." WORLD LITERATURE TODAY "Snippets of Latin and strings of allusion remind us of how much most contemporary readers do not know, or will forget; complexities of pattern and dizzying shifts of tone will keep Hill's considerable, and considerably learned, following alertly delighted." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
