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Hill began by saying that the man who had called him the greatest living poet in poetry or prose had taken that statement back and said that he now wrote like an old nit. After much laughter he then said that many had come to his defense and claimed, “He still wrote something that was a small bit interesting.”
The subdued humor that Hill radiated complemented his poems as he spoke of major themes of his works. “Sex and death, that’s it really,” he said in his monotone voice. Hill's poetry reflected a relevance to political and historical events that allowed people to connect with the poems on a surface level, but as the poems continued, many were lost in the complexities of his ideas.
Even though his voice remained at the same soothing level for the majority of the time that he spoke, his pauses and emphases on certain excerpts evoked despair and longing that wrenched the listener’s heart.
He bleeds from pride, I from my heart
In an excerpt from The Orchards of Syon the poet asked, “What do I mean?” and to a woman “I think you are a muse or something". Invoking inspiration that he could not come to grips with himself, Hill brought a new level to the destruction of war that he was focusing on.
He was described as inaccessible in some ways, cryptic even. But his short anecdotes added miles to the poems that were read. In a more personal section, Hill spoke about his father and uncle who both loved to garden. Poetry often looks to entangle the reader and here Hill does so, but to the level where even the poet is caught in the despair of the language.
A one point Hill said: “A poem should rock you back on your heels.” If this is true, then Hill certainly lives up to his own expectations of a poem. In the final minutes of the reading, Hill read a series called Pentecost Castle, in which he evoked emotions of love, desire, despair, torture, and self doubt. In perhaps the most moving statement of the evening Hill read, “He bleeds from pride, I from my heart”, after which the room was silent as he simply looked up and closed his book.
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