A book-length poem describes the author's slow coming-to-terms with the brutality, political idiocy, and ecclesiastic blindness of the twentieth century, and his own failings The Triumph of Love is a swan song for our most violent and turbulent of centuries. Geoffrey Hill has a reputation as a difficult poet, and it's true that this volume is no easy read, but it's by no means inaccessible, either. Forming a book-length poem divided into 150 sections, its free verse is rich with allusions from Petrarch to the Scott expedition and dense with the weight of history and philosophy. Hill takes nothing less than suffering as his subject, and his poems aren't shy about staring evil straight in the face--in particular, the Holocaust, an evil compounded by our inability to distinguish one of its victims from the next: "this, and this, / the unique face, indistinguishable, this, these, choked in a cess-pit of leaking Sheol." If the subject matter is uniformly somber, the style is not. Fragmented, colloquial, often interrupted by editorial asides, parodies, and snatches of song, The Triumph of Love marks something of a departure from the stately formalism of Hill's earlier books. Through it all runs the self-interrogating, self-mocking voice of the poet, questioning his right to write about such matters as well as the language he uses to do so. In the end, however, Hill finds that the elegy itself is the only answer to the questions history poses. "What / Ought a poem to be?" he asks himself, and answers (three times), "a sad and angry consolation." Widely recognized as one of Britain's distinguished poets, here Hill has produced a memorably sad and angry consolation for "a nation / with so many memorials but no memory." Hill has long enjoyed a quiet reputation as one of the most brilliant living poets in English, and certain poems from earlier collections looked like the signposts of a great career. But since the 1970s Hill's poetry has carried the increasingly rebarbative tone of The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1985. o.p.) and Canaan (Houghton, 1997), retreating into an ardent Anglicanism that almost entirely renounces salvation. The stance he adopts here is that of an angry prophet, hectoring and humorless. Contemplating his life and the century's from the point where the "terrible Angel of Procreation" begins to give place to "the Angel-in-hiding of Senility," Hill rages at our failure in "the whole-keeping of Augustine's City of God"; his only solace is a faith defined as "inescapable endurance." Despite Hill's erudition, not many readers will respond to this switchbacking journey through hundreds of learned allusions. For larger collections.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. ...a book-length meditation on "the fire-targeted century" now ending, an elegy for everyone who has burned. -- The New York Times Book Review , Langdon Hammer Geoffrey Hill may be the strongest and most original English poet of the second half of our fading century, although his work is by no means either easy or very popular. Dense, intricate, exceedingly compact, his poetry has always had great visionary force... -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review , John Hollander The Triumph Of Love: 1 The Triumph Of Love: 10 The Triumph Of Love: 100 The Triumph Of Love: 101 The Triumph Of Love: 102 The Triumph Of Love: 103 The Triumph Of Love: 104 The Triumph Of Love: 105 The Triumph Of Love: 106 The Triumph Of Love: 107 The Triumph Of Love: 108 The Triumph Of Love: 109 The Triumph Of Love: 11 The Triumph Of Love: 110 The Triumph Of Love: 111 The Triumph Of Love: 112 The Triumph Of Love: 113 The Triumph Of Love: 114 The Triumph Of Love: 115 The Triumph Of Love: 116 The Triumph Of Love: 117 The Triumph Of Love: 118 The Triumph Of Love: 119 The Triumph Of Love: 12 The Triumph Of Love: 120 The Triumph Of Love: 121 The Triumph Of Love: 122 The Triumph Of Love: 123 The Triumph Of Love: 124 The Triumph Of Love: 125 The Triumph Of Love: 126 The Triumph Of Love: 127 The Triumph Of Love: 128 The Triumph Of Love: 129 The Triumph Of Love: 13 The Triumph Of Love: 130 The Triumph Of Love: 131 The Triumph Of Love: 132 The Triumph Of Love: 133 The Triumph Of Love: 134 The Triumph Of Love: 135 The Triumph Of Love: 136 The Triumph Of Love: 137 The Triumph Of Love: 138 The Triumph Of Love: 139 The Triumph Of Love: 14 The Triumph Of Love: 140 The Triumph Of Love: 141 The Triumph Of Love: 142 The Triumph Of Love: 143 The Triumph Of Love: 144 The Triumph Of Love: 145 The Triumph Of Love: 146 The Triumph Of Love: 147 The Triumph Of Love: 148 The Triumph Of Love: 149 The Triumph Of Love: 15 The Triumph Of Love: 150 The Triumph Of Love: 16 The Triumph Of Love: 17 The Triumph Of Love: 18 The Triumph Of Love: 19 The Triumph Of Love: 2 The Triumph Of Love: 20 The Triumph Of Love: 21 The Triumph Of Love: 22