Geoffrey Hill

Poet; Professor of Poetry at Oxford University

A man dressed in black coat, trousers and hat stands in a wintery garden, leaning on a walking stick; behind him a bare tree is covered in frost Sir Geoffrey Hill, by Chris Floyd, 20 December 2007, NPG x135193, © Chris Floyd

Poet. Hill was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 2010. His recent collections include Without Title (2006), Selected Poems (2006), and A Treatise of Civil Power (2007). In 2009 his Collected Writings won the Truman Capote award for Literary Criticism. He was knighted in 2012 for Services to Literature.

They bespoke doomsday and they meant it by God, their curved metal rimming the low ridge.

From ‘Funeral Music’ in New and Collected Poems (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994)

But those eyes — like a Greek letter, omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl

From ‘The Peacock at Alderton’ in Poetry Magazine (March 2007)