The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin
Editorial Notes
Geoffrey Hill, the son of a police constable, was born in
Worcestershire in 1932. He was educated at Bromsgrove County High
School and at Keble College, Oxford. After teaching for more than
thirty years in England, first at Leeds and subsequently at
Cambridge, he became Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston
University in Massachusetts, where he was also founding co-director
of the Editorial Institute. In 2010 he was elected Professor of
Poetry at the
University of Oxford.
Kenneth Haynes is Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics
at Brown University.
[Geoffrey Hill's] final testimony, The Book of Baruch by the
Gnostic Justin, still felt timely in its tintinnabulous quarrelling
with post-imperial Britain. It is not the place to start with
Hill's work, but it was a barnstorming last bow.
*Jeremy Noel-Todd, The Sunday Times, Books of the Year 2019*
Relentlessly quotable.
*Tristram Fane Saunders, The Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
2019*
Selected as a 2019 Book of the Year in The Times Literary
Supplement
Hill's deployment of his own notions of true and false gnosis gives
the book a kind of key signature, pointing away from the world of
"Widely applauded honours and prizes" towards what's authentic,
exemplary and potentially restorative.
*Fraser Steel, Church Times*
A wonderful combination of visionary genius, cross old git, and
lyric majesty ... Crammed with interest. Disturbing. Infuriating
and sometimes pretentious nonsense. There is no doubting Hill's
greatness. Hélas!
*A.N. Wilson, The Church Times, Books of the Year 2019*
The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin [...] reads as if John
Milton had joined forces with John Berryman to engage in a
passionate diatribe-cum-elegy on the state of the nation and the
state of poetry, not without reference to Brexit, the Blitz and
Hill's own imminent demise. An unacknowledged legislator for our
time? You bet.
*Harry Eyres, The Tablet, Books of the Year 2019*
remarkable testamentary volume... There is scarcely one of the 271
sections in this book that does not assail the reader with the
force of a vatic last judgment... The Book of Baruch is a work of
the sovereign imagination"
*David Wheatley, The Guardian*
The Book of Baruch is, without doubt, one of the most extraordinary
books of the Brexit era.
*Jeremy Noel-Todd, The Sunday Times*
It is among his greatest work.
*Nicholas Lezard, The Spectator*
In its passion and clarity, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic
Justin will be gratefully received by those who find Hill's earlier
work his most affecting ... and in addition [it has] a good deal of
the grandeur (and less of the grandiosity) of his later work ...
But in its sheer abundance, as well as its manifold beauties and
rigorous interrogations, the book can only confirm our sense of the
magnitude of his achievement.
*Andrew Motion, Times Literary Supplement*
Hill has been very well served by the excellent Kenneth Haynes, who
saw both his prose and his poetry into the magnificence of their
Oxford editions while Hill was alive, and who now brings this final
posthumous poem to press.
*Seamus Perry, London Review of Books*
This posthumous collection ... embodies a controversial but
impassioned idea of what poetry is and does. It deserves our
respectful, careful attention.
*David Womersley, Standpoint*
The book was probably never meant to be finished -- it's a
scrapheap he might have added to for years, scraping, fine-tuning,
revising in eternal contention with the world, with himself ... The
whole is riveting and a little mad, laid out in mouse print like an
interminable sonata of footnotes.
*William Logan, New Criterion*
[The Book of Baruch] was composed in the last few years and months
of Hill's life and its faithful editing by Kenneth Haynes is itself
a remarkable work of scholarship.
*Jeffrey Wainwright, PN Review*
If you know and like Hill, this volume is clearly a must.
*Brian McClorry SJ, Thinking Faith*
Certainly nothing for those who want their verse accessible and
familiar, but for anyone open to this sort of thing The Book of
Baruch by the Gnostic Justin is a fascinating (and occasionally
daunting-to-maddening) treasure trove.
*M.A.Orthofer, Complete Review*
The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin resists classification. It
is a magnificent conclusion to his oeuvre, and will, I'm sure, be
seen by future critics as a key text of our troubled times.
*Shiny New Books*
An engaging curiosity... Arguably resembling a prose poem, these
not-quite-paragraphs deliver a thunderous, line-by-line, biblical
cadence while internal and off-rhymes proliferate at a near...
sing-song rate.
*Patrick James Dunagan, Rain Taxi Review*
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