Baroque in a book bind at Borders

And I have nothing to say because all I’ve read for two weeks is The Camomile Lawn, by Mary Wesley. There. I admitted it. And, awakened with rude slowness from my fantasy that London would be wallpapered with secondhand copies of this book — as it was wallpapered with new ones in the late '80s — I came to at the till in Borders, in the act of forking out the full retail price. Now I’ve read it, there’s nothing left but to give it to the sodding charity shop. And in the new edition.

The Camomile Lawn

Also bought recently the new Penguin Selected Geoffrey Hill — another book I’ve been seeking, and with a lovely black-&-white-&-red-all-over jacket in keeping with the series’ lovely new fifties-looking graphics. It’s about time Penguin revamped its wonderful poetry list; Geoffrey Hill has become surprisingly hard to get hold of — his works, I mean.

There is a delicious quote from George Steiner on the Penguin website: "Among our finest poets," he says, euphemisitcally, "...the most European."

The meaning here is clear enough - Hill is unashamedly not anti-intellectual, not an anecdotist, not driven by the desire to please, nor by some half-baked fundamentalist atheism, nor does he write like he hates words - but you have to wonder what the ellipsis stands for.