Canaan.

In Canaan, the British poet Geoffrey Hill returns with characteristic sobriety to a number of perennial Christian themes: morality, faith, innocence, redemption, and the struggle against evil. Readers should expect little succor, however, from Hill's tortured and tortuous new volume of poems (the first in over ten years from the Boston University professor). While a growing critical consensus would rank Hill among the greatest living poets in the language, he is also widely considered one of the most difficult, in both subject matter and style. Yet despite the cautions inherent in Hill's obscurity and arcane allusiveness, attention to Canaan's terse, knotted lyrics is amply, if dolorously, rewarded. In an age of broadening secularity, Hill's is that rare achievement - a profoundly religious poetry.

A biblical epigraph sets the collection's dire tone: "So ye children of Israel did wickedly in the sight of the Lord, & forgate the Lord their God, & served Baalim, and Asheroth [...] O Canaan, the land of the Philistines, I will even destroy thee without an inhabitant." Hill borrows something of the severe tenor and cadence of prophecy for his own poetry, weighing the promise of England, and by extension all of Europe, with that ancient Promised Land of the Israelites: "Where's probity in this - / the slither-frisk / to lordship of a kind / as rats to a bird-table?" Continuing in a dark register, Hill commemorates, among other transgressions, graft-taking by British parliamentarians, as England's "wounds weep / into the lens of oblivion." His disgust and condemnatory ire suggest a twentieth-century Savanarola in rare form (though Hill has turned such opprobrium on himself with equal force). While the poet Rosanna Warren rightly suggests that Hill's poetry appears "tormented by Christian theology," here it is placed on the rack of contemporary civil misdeeds.

The book's sequences - "To the High Court of Parliament," "Dark-Land," "Mysticism and Democracy," and "Parentalia" - are broken up and scattered throughout the volume, interleaved with isolated lyrics in a minor key. "It is said Adonai your hidden word / declares itself / even from obscurity," Hill writes in the opening lines of "A Song of Degrees." The words take on a credo-like resonance: what is revealed of the Word must be puzzled over in the dark glass of words. For the late poet and critic Donald Davie, Hill was "a writer so desperately aware of the duplicity of language - perhaps of all language, certainly of British English - that he would elevate opacity as the highest virtue and prime duty of all responsible writing." Hill's quarrel with language helps to explain the famous recalcitrance of his poems, as well as their mastery of ambiguity. Slyly deployed, words often assume double and triple duty, as in the clause "We suffer commonly, ..." where "common" suggests "usual," "communal," and "base" by turns. In a line that can support three disparate readings, exact meaning becomes hard to pinpoint.

Such is the "slither-frisk" of language in a fallen world. For Hill, the loss of innocence occasioned by this century's atrocities, and by the Holocaust in particular, becomes an antitype of the Fall of Man. Hill describes recent horrors unflinchingly, as in the book's title poem: "Now it is / Moloch his ovens / and the dropped babes naked / swung by an arm / or a leg like flails."

Moloch, Asheroth, Baal - these are among the demons and false idols haunting Hill's vision of history. As a measure of the persistence of his themes, it should be remembered that Hill began his first book, For the Unfallen (1958), with "Genesis," written when he was nineteen, in which he cautions, "There is no bloodless myth will hold." His broodings on the past have ranged from Anglo-Catholic Christianity to medieval King Offa's reign, and from the Wars of the Roses to World War II. From his first melancholy lines, Hill has remained bloody, bold, and staunchly irresolute when it comes to trusting in language's power to carry the necessary burdens. "A poet's words," he has claimed, "are not his utterance so much as his resistance."

Hill dedicates the eight-part "De Jure Belli ac Pacis" ("On the Law of War and Peace," taken from the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius) to Hans-Bernd von Haeften, a conspirator in the plot to overthrow Hitler in July 1944. The poem recounts the Christian lawyer von Haeften's execution against the backdrop of a Europe in ruins. "Evil is not good's absence but gravity's / everlasting bedrock," the poem avers, characterizing evil not as it is often construed - as privation - but as a brute fact and self-sustaining force. We leave these poems, not heartened, but chastened.

Hill's pathfinding over the roughest of history's moral terrain rarely discovers the simple way. To do so would belie the complexity of his concerns ("the truth is difficult to follow," he reminds us). Even Hill's familiar prosodic forms, his previous sonnets and pentameters, here assume the aspect of tortuous, switchback trails along jagged half-lines barely punctuated - a warning, lest we'd missed it, that redemption's ascent exacts its price. Hill so thoroughly mistrusts art's ability to get at truth, it's as if he prefers his poems to be read for their white-hot phrases rather than as seamless wholes. Each rift, however, has been loaded with the terrible, perfect word and an allusiveness.

The obstacles posed by Hill's poetry - the fact that it yields its riches only to patient readings and re-readings - have caused much grumbling among critics. Devoted readers of poetry, however, often think nothing of considering a poet over many years, arriving with each pass at a deeper appreciation. Given the myriad and somber rewards of Hill's art, one would be hard pressed to discover a contemporary poet who deserves our attention more.

David Yezzi's poems and reviews are forthcoming from The Paris Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, and other magazines. He is the associate editor of The New Criterion.