Speech! Speech! Poems

With Daumier as his muse, Geoffrey Hill, "the best poet we have, assaults the emptiness of public discourse to which we have become accustomed."-- Evening Standard . With our minds and ears fouled by degraded public speech--by media hype, insipid sermons, hollow political rhetoric, and the ritual misuse of words--how do we begin to think and speak honestly? At a time when our common language has been made false and ugly, how does the artist find words to communicate truth and beauty? These are the questions that Geoffrey Hill addresses in Speech! Speech! , a caustic, tragicomic tour de force that the London Guardian , naming it the poetry book of the year, called "magisterial--a classic of English poetry."