"His attacks on the 'Entertainment overkill' of modern culture speaks to what Heaney described as his 'acute distress at the falling away of standards'"

Geoffrey Hill: poetry should be shocking and surprising

Sometimes difficult and often very funny, Sir Geoffrey Hill is Britain’s greatest living poet. He grants a rare audience to Sameer Rahim

By Sameer Rahim

7:00AM GMT 14 Dec 2013

"His attacks on the “Entertainment overkill” of modern culture speaks to what Heaney described as his “acute distress at the falling away of standards”. This often takes the form of a pungent grumpiness. In the poem “Broken Hierarchies”, from Without Title (2006), an English landscape is lashed by a storm: “the roadway sprouts ten thousand flowerets, / storm-paddies instantly reaped, replenished, / and again cut down”. Those flattened roadside flowers make an emblem of tawdry Britain. “I contrast hierarchy with hegemony,” Hill tells me. (“Bless hierarchy, dismiss hegemony, / Thus I grind to conclusion” he writes in his most recent sequence, The Daybooks.)"