`This Trawl of Gratitude'

Like the U.S. Postal Service, libraries reliably perform daily miracles no one seems to notice or appreciate. One week after I ordered A Treatise of Civil Power, by Geoffrey Hill, through the interlibrary loan service at my university library, I received an e-mail telling me it had arrived. Handsomely published in 2005 by the Clutag Press of Thame, in Oxfordshire, England, in an edition of 400 copies (the one I’m holding is hand-numbered 178), the eight-poem pamphlet was shipped from the Widener Library at Harvard. Presumably this is a valuable piece of Hilliana, as it sold out and went out of print almost immediately. Yale University Press has announced it will publish a hardcover edition later this year in the U.S., and Penguin will bring it out in England, but for now I can enjoy a beautiful piece of printing and Hill’s priceless work because a library at the other end of the continent trusts me to take good care of it.

The centerpiece of the collection is the title poem of 42 eight-line stanzas, in which Hill expresses gratitude for his poetic forebears, some of them unexpected -- Milton, Ben Jonson (Hill calls him “my god”), Robert Herrick, William Blake, Robert Lowell (“Closet Confederate”) and, most surprisingly, John Berryman. Here’s Stanza XX:

“And Berryman – how did he slip through
this trawl of gratitude? The Dream Songs, then,
with other things; their bone-yard vaudeville,
sparkish, morose, multi-voiced monologue,
erratic tenderness to self and lovers.
A gentle courteous man, no-nonsense scholar,
badly transmitted, blarneying on location,
face-fungused wizard in a camp film.”

There’s a childish part of me that prefers my friends to approve of each other, if not exactly becoming friends themselves. I’m pleased Hill esteems Berryman, though his scorn wouldn’t have altered my devotion. I’m also pleased he writes of Berryman without bringing up alcoholism, depression or suicide. I’m reminded of a profile of Christopher Ricks, written by Nicholas Wroe and published in the Guardian in 2005. Wroe writes:

“[Ricks] doesn't hesitate to include [Bob] Dylan in his personal pantheon alongside [William] Empson, [T.S.]Eliot, [Samuel] Beckett, [Philip] Larkin, [Robert] Lowell and [Geoffrey] Hill.”

Then he quotes Ricks:

“I felt it was an extraordinary bit of luck to be alive at the same time as these great creators. I've had great pleasure from lots of dead poets as well, but I can't imagine not chafing to get hold of a new something by, say, Beckett in the week it came out.”