Clavics

This very English poet's grand, rich lines won him transatlantic fame. This allusive sequence commemorates the 17th-century composer William Lawes; each one-page poem has two asymmetrical parts, the first an intricately rhymed 20 lines, the second a shaped stanza like George Herbert's concrete poem, "Easter Wings." As he has done before, Hill chastises the present age ("Democracy is a Potemkin fiction/Anarchical plutocracy/Proliferates its gyre"); considers his own strenuous career ("the recusant/At my fingertips, for whom I write well/ Into my scant-/ Extended age"); honors prior poets, ambivalently or devotedly, from Ben Jonson to Arthur Rimbaud and Robert Lowell; and explores, learnedly, Christian faith and Christian doubt. Lines that stand beautifully on their own abut harsh instructions to resistant readers: "Music cannot forever exhaust time./Tell me what it is I labour around." Snippets of Latin and strings of allusion remind us 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. (Oct.)