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Article: Canaan.
- Article from:
- World Literature Today
- Article date:
- June 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 University of Oklahoma. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Geoffrey Hill. Boston. Houghton Mifflin / Penguin. 1997. xii + 76 pages. $22/[pounds]7.99. ISBN 0-395-87550-1.
Geoffrey Hill's poetry has a reputation for being notoriously difficult, for making few, if any, compromises with his readers. The poems contained in Canaan will not appreciably alter that reputation. It is not so much his persistent penchant for being intertextual that makes for most of the interpretative obstacles. Here the range of allusion is fairly narrow - mostly, as one might expect from the title, to the Bible - and where it isn't, as in the multitude of epigraphs, the author has appended a few notes at the end of the volume where one senses at least ...