Dimensions
134 x 216 x 6mm
A tragi-comic work from a ferocious modern prophet, 'Speech! Speech!' offers us poetry as violent truth. Intended as a praise-song to honesty, this companion piece to the critically acclaimed 'The Triumphant Of Love' presents the poet wrestling with his craft. For Hill's compulsion to speak is twinned with his loss of faith in the power of public speech. How can one express anything in a "dead language"? And who is there to listen in this "dead age"?
Playful, original and profound, Hill's subject throughout is the here and now - the world of fax machines and the internet, of rap music and Elton John, of global politics and disintegrating dystopian dreams. But history and myth are present too, as Hill delivers a poem for each of the 120 days of Sodom, communicating high moral purpose through his clamour of warring tongues; allowing us to glimpse the mythical in the insistently modern, the tender in the intensely savage, especially in the elegiac sections on the death of Princess Diana.
