POETRY IN REVIEW

1 5 4 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W P A U L F R A N Z The English poet Keith Douglas once compared his art to ‘‘a man, whom thinking you know all his movements and appearance you will presently come upon in such a posture that for a moment you can hardly believe it a position of the limbs you know.’’ This conceit about poetry extends itself naturally to the poetic career. What it seems to imply, beyond initial dismay, is a second, dawning perception not of disjuncture but of continuity between the new and the older ‘‘postures,’’ compelling your changed awareness of the person you thought you knew, whom maybe you did know, but not consciously as this person. The later poetry of Geo√rey Hill – once variously datable from 1997’s Canaan, or 1998’s The Triumph of Love, and by now containing distinct phases and subphases – presents several such rearrangements , or shocking derangements, of the limbs. Peer Gynt, Hill’s first new work in verse to appear since the imposing Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, was published in the United King- ‘ ‘ P e e r G y n t ’ ’ a n d ‘ ‘ B r a n d , ’ ’ by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Geo√rey Hill (Penguin, 400 pp., $17 paper) 1 5 5 R dom on the day of his death, 30 June 2016, at age eighty-four. A translation, or rather ‘‘version . . . based on a literal translation by Janet Garton and edited by Kenneth Haynes,’’ of the play by Henrik Ibsen, it complements the ‘‘version for the stage’’ of the Norwegian dramatist’s Brand that Hill produced for the National Theatre Company of London in 1978. The latter, based on an ‘‘annotated literal prose translation’’ by the now late Inga StinaEwbank , has appeared in print twice before. In bringing together these two verse dramas – first published in 1866 and 1867, the successes of Ibsen’s early middle age, before he abandoned the form for prose – the new Penguin edition lets readers compare works that have traditionally been considered foils of each other. It also o√ers a suggestive parallel for Hill’s own poetic trajectory. As such, it presents a striking stylistic contrast. In his terse, mannered introduction to the 1996 Penguin Brand, whose loss from the new edition should make the earlier a collector’s item, Hill described his attraction to Ibsen’s remark that he ‘‘wanted a metre in which I could career where I would, as on horseback.’’ Hill recounts how his search for an equivalent settled on a fastmoving three-beat line, a foot shorter than Ibsen’s original, but avoiding what he experienced as the tendency of its strict English counterpart to expand into the familiar dramatic pentameter. The result, with its pervasive enjambment and roving irregular rhymes, is dramatic language of consistent high intensity, as much in stray passages as in scenes of overt confrontation. Here is the protagonist , Brand – a dour religious fanatic who feels himself called to preach and live out his stern gospel in a remote mountain village – speaking early in the play: Now I see where I am: strangely close to home. Everything I recall from childhood here still but smaller now and much shabbier; and the church looks in need of repair. The cli√s loom; the glacier juts and hangs: it is an ice wall concealing the sun. 1 5 6 F R A N Z Y And for all their rough gleam the fjord waters look grim and menacing. A small boat pitches in a squall. In the hands of another translator, this would be merely what it is: exposition, revealing the childhood wounds that Hill and, before him, W. H. Auden, have seen as rendering thoroughly ambiguous – because psychologically overdetermined – Brand’s religious calling . But Hill lets these recognitions land with unusual force. The abrupt, typically Hillian verbs – ‘‘loom,’’ ‘‘juts and hangs,’’ ‘‘pitches’’ – extend the psychic landscape in space, just enough to let it encroach. If ‘‘The church / looks in need of repair’’ is a bit topheavy in its overtones, ‘‘strangely close to home’’ tingles with oxymoron. To the latter...