Geoffrey Hill and Yves Bonnefoy died today

it's pretty depressing how many authors I only hear about because they died

I only read Salter because he died recently and he's amazing

Goodnight sweet Prince Geoffrey.

I had hoped that there was still more to come from him. I read through his collected works all through last year, astounded that there were still people producing poetry like it. I love his grumpy persona, I loved his bitching about Carol Ann Duffy to the press. I loved the prophetic drive and anger in his work. He seemed to pick up speed later in life and I really wanted more. And now he's gone.

>>8230700
I sometimes find it depressing to read him because his poetry is so obviously above anything that I will ever be able to write.

The collection I bought contains all of his poetry up to 1992. I couldn't find other works of his, because I live in Brazil, and the dollar is very expensive now.

Have you read his critical writings? A Brazilian poet once said he was the best poetry critic of our time.

His YouTube interviews are very funny. He seemed to be a wonderful, wonderful person.

File: Geoffrey Hill.jpg (44KB, 448x293px) Image search: [Google]

44KB, 448x293px

How does Geoffrey Hill's first poem compare with yours, /lit/?
I
Against the burly air I strode
Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear
Upon the dead weight of the land;
And the waves flourished at my prayer,
The rivers spawned their sand.

And where the streams were salt and full
The tough pig-headed salmon strove,
Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull,
To reach the steady hills above.

II

The second day I stood and saw
The osprey plunge with triggered claw,
Feathering blood along the shore,
To lay the living sinew bare.

And the third day I cried: ‘Beware
The soft-voiced owl, the ferret’s smile,
The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air,
Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel,
Forever bent upon the kill.

III

And I renounced, on the fourth day,
This fierce and unregenerate clay,

Building as a huge myth for man
The watery Leviathan,

And made the glove-winged albatross
Scour the ashes of the sea
Where Capricorn and Zero cross,
A brooding immortality—
Such as the charmed phoenix has
In the unwithering tree.

IV

The phoenix burns as cold as frost
And, like a legendary ghost,
The phantom-bird goes wild and lost
Upon a pointless ocean tossed.

So, the fifth day, I turned again
To flesh and blood and the blood’s pain.

V.

On the sixth day, as I rode
In haste about the works of God,
With spurs I plucked the horse’s blood.

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ’s blood are men made free
Though in close shrouds their bodies lie
Under the rough pelt of the sea.

Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight
The bones that cannot bear the light.