born 19.6.32 — deported 24.9.42
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time.
As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries.
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(I have made an elegy for myself it is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.
This is plenty. This is more than enough.
Taken from Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill (Viking, 2006). © Geoffrey Hill, 1968. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd
After a number of false starts involving Derek Walcott and Ruth Padel, Oxford finally has a professor of poetry in the august form of Geoffrey Hill. While Hill is widely respected in the poetry world, he is not exactly a household name (not that many poets are, mind you) and several readers have asked me to print one of his poems. This is one of three poems he wrote about the Holocaust.
The writer Rosie Alison says Hill is her favourite poet and she thinks of the words in this poem “I have made an elegy for myself it is true” every day. Some critics who admire Hill’s multilayered allusive works call him the “strongest poet writing in English today”; others find him needlessly inscrutable. My feeling is that any poet who can provoke a strong reaction of any kind must be doing something right.
Daisy Goodwin