Here is public poetry of uncommon moral urgency: it bears witness to the sufferings of the innocent at the hands of history and to the martyrdom of those who have dared look history in the eye. "Rich, quarrelsome...handsome and brutish...Hill's poetry is the major achievement of late-twentieth-century verse," says The New Criterion. "Canaan is one of the few serious books we will have to mark the millennium."

A book-length poem describes the author's slow coming-to-terms with the brutality, political idiocy, and ecclesiastic blindness of the twentieth century, and his own failings.

Poetry has sometimes been credited with a special place as a form of conduct in language, as if it were a world of words of its own from which the poet masterfully dispenses a distinctly free speech. These essays enquire whether such high praises, even when sincere, are apt to the real conditions of poets' work, to their share of drudgery, their fears of misapprehension or their need to please, to the entanglements of meaning in historical communities.

This volume brings together poems from four decades of Geoffrey Hill's work.