Because Geoffrey Hill is an Important Poet, I came to Speech! Speech! prepared to invest whatever energy the book required in order that I might achieve understanding of what I was certain would be a literary masterpiece.

I failed, or else Hill failed, because I'm not sure I understand anything.

The book opens with two epigrams: one in Latin, one in German. My Latin is mostly forgotten; I have no German. Even before reaching the poems, I felt I was at a disadvantage. That feeling persisted through my encounter with the first poem:

Erudition. Pain. Light. Imagine it great
unavoidable work; although: heroic
verse a non-starter, says PEOPLE. Some believe
we over-employ our gifts. Given identical
street parties, confusion, rapid exposure,
practice self-emulation: music for crossed
hands; for two fingers; music
for taxiing to take-off; for cremation.
Archaic means | files pillage and erased
in one generation. Judge the distance.
Innocent bystanders on stand-by. Painful
scenes mar final auto-da-fé.

There are phrases here that I like. The line about music for crossed hands, for instance. But what is self-emulation, other than a play on self-immolation? What's the point of the diacritical | mark, other than showing us Hill knows that's a good place for a caesura? To whom does PEOPLE refer?

Hill puts many words in caps, and not all of them seem to be characters; sometimes he does it just for emphasis. ("CAPITALS | STAGE DIRECTIONS AND OTHER/ FORMS OF SUBPOENA," he explains belatedly in poem 117.) But other character names appear, as PEOPLE did: RAPMASTER, for instance, recurs. Unfortunately, I never deciphered who or what they are.

Hill teaches religion, and I am a religion aficionado; the lines and phrases I liked best in his book tend to be ones which mark that intersection of our interests. "Finally/ untranscribable, that which ís," he writes in poem 16, a pleasantly taut restatement of the assertion that the Tao which can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.

Many of his religious allusions are witty. Poem 19 brings the phrase "Semiotics/ rule | semiautomatics," which made me laugh. Poem 31 begins by playing with the Christian notion of the Word made flesh. "This WORD | the word you are so strenuously/ enacting: could it be CHARADE? Or CHIE?/ Nót CHIE? Merde then | I pass "

Of course, I don't know what CHIE means, nor in what language's dictionary I should look for it, but I'm amused by his conflation of the Incarnation with a children's game.

In poem 29, he treats the reader as a confidant:

Between us
is the Pope to be trusted? Cán he divide
night from day? What is his sphere of desire?
What price the menorah's one-octave
chant of candles?

"[D]ivide/ night from day" uses its line break beautifully, evoking God's famous speech in the book of Job. And I love "the menorah's one-octave/ chant of candles[.]" But why should the menorah come at a price?

In poem 20, he riffs on Valery's "All art aspires to the condition of music" with "Not/ music. Hebrew. Poetry aspires/ to the condition of Hebrew." The lines reward my awareness of Valery; had I not known the quote, I would have found the assertion confusing. What's frustrating is the feeling that every confusing element in this book might have a point, but I'm not sufficiently intellectual to get it.

Most of these poems contain interesting things that don't link together in a way that I can decipher. The beginning of poem 71, for instance:

I trust that she is now done with the body
search, close interrogation, the finger-
printing, the restless limbo of the Quais,
the depilatory | and ritual bath.