TENEBRAE

First edition, first printing. Original green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by David Quay and Peter Horridge. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Upper spine tip a little bumped. In the fine dustwrapper. Not price-clipped (£2.50 net to the front flap).

Following the Anglo-Saxon preoccupations of 'Mercian Hymns' (1971), 'Tenebrae', Hill's fourth collection, takes as points of departure for its two main sequences the Spanish Counter-Reformation (in 'The Pentecost Castle') and English recusant music and poetry in the sonnet sequence 'Lachrimae, or Seven tears figured in seven passionate Pavans', its title and shape after John Dowland's great instrumental sequence, its epigraph from the recusant poet Robert Southwell. The book is completed by another labyrinthine sonnet sequence, 'An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England' (its epigrams from Coleridge and Disraeli), a group of shorter poems, and the brief title sequence. "The preoccupations of the book, particularly the tortuousness of desire – 'Our love is what we love to have' – and the ecstasies of wounding and self-wounding, do not achieve a proportioned resolution. Rather their reiteration is almost spat out with a punched clarity that even so cannot escape contradiction and self- contradiction. [...] It is hard to think of a work that challenges the terms of its own existence as remorselessly as 'Tenebrae'". (Jeffrey Wainright).