Triumph of Love CL: Avail in Paper

Unexpectedly soon after last year's searing Canaan comes Hill's latest indictment of Western Culture, once again obsessively examining the pockmarked, exhausted corpse of ""Europa."" A single poem of 150 stanzas, The Triumph of Love uncharacteristically reads as if it had been written in non-stop, Kerouac-style sessions, though Hill's signature densely wrought, freighted lines remain. Here, Hill's preoccupations are Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, the apocalyptic fire-bombings of cities in Britain and Germany and the shoah, invoked by reference to The Book of Daniel, the work of Callot and intimations of its horrors that seemingly came to the poet in boyhood. In grappling with the question of redemption for the murdered, Hill finds himself questioning--in ""livid"" self-examinations addressing a career's worth of criticism--the didactic mode he has previously used to such great effect. With the same granite-cut allusions and morally outraged rants that have incurred charges of turgid iconoclasm, Hill defiantly clings to his chosen mode (""I offer to the presiding judge of our art, self-pleasured Ironia""), even as he sputters in not-quite-mock self-justification. Summoning poetic heroes from Milton to Eugenio Montale, Hill finally tries out the possibilities of praise (""Lauda? Lauda? Lauda Sion? LAUDA!"") only to turn and undercut them: ""Incantation of incontinence--the lyric cry?/ Believe me, he's not/ told you the half of it. (All who are able may stand.)"" Despite the tongue-in-cheek invitation, the reader who has followed Hill's heroic efforts to answer to history may be tempted to stand in admiration anyway. (Sept.)