A Treatise of Civil Power is Geoffrey Hill’s seventh collection since 1994: in the previous 25 years, Hill, who was born in 1932, published only five. Age and the times seem to have combined to release this late surge. The Hill of recent years can appear very different from his younger self. The dense, at times tormented musicality of Funeral Music, his sequence on the Wars of the Roses, and the myth-making power of the prose-poem sequence Mercian Hymns, have often given way to something more unbuttoned, even garrulous. Happily, though not without its flatter moments, this book is a good deal more interesting than much of Hill’s recent work.

Nachwort, Hill’s afterword, states: “I don’t much have / the patience, now, of the artificer / that so enthrals itself, impels / mass, energy, deep, the stubborn line, / the line that is that quickens to delay.” Yet he still commands the energy to deliver that crisp, richly suggestive closing paradox, where labour and inspiration, flesh and spirit, are held in balance in a language founded in scripture.

As with any serious poet, concern for language itself is at the core of his work, but Hill’s relationship to language is markedly embattled. Language may issue from logos, the divine word of St John’s Gospel, but in a fallen world it is corruptible, even (and perhaps in Hill’s view, especially) in the most conscientious hands. Etymology must always be in view. Nachwort, for example, gathers several significant strands in the book. The word “artificer” refers both to the artist-craftsman and Hill’s forebears, Welsh iron-workers transplanted to the Midlands. It also has military overtones, for example as a job title in the Royal Engineers, while Hephaestos, the Greek armourer-god, made Achilles’s shield, the weapon as work of art. Planning the overthrow of God, John Milton’s Satan (seen by some as the type of the rebellious artist) is the “artificer of fraud”. This encircling ambiguity is characteristic.

Hill’s book always leads back to Milton, the great poet of the civil war. It takes its title from Milton’s 1659 essay addressed to parliament on freedom of religious conscience. Milton argues from the evidence of scripture, viewing its language as common cultural property, however vexed the times – a condition that, in the past 100 years, has become unthinkable for many. In an age when the visible grows ever more dominant (at the expense of language, many poets would say), Hill suggests in The Minor Prophets that someone should film the fiery Old Testament Book of Joel, but in case the scorn isn’t sufficiently apparent, the nearby poem On Reading Milton and the English Revolution remembers the 1970 film Cromwell, wishing the main role had not been taken by “R Harris / with laryngitis. A simulacrum / of living speech strikes the aggrieved ear”. (On the other hand, “H Mirren is super”, although whether in general or as Eliza-beth I isn’t specified.)

The conduct of the artist in times of crisis has long concerned Hill. It reemerges here with In Memoriam: Ernst Barlach, addressed to the German sculptor (1870-1938), a maker of haunting cenotaphs and memorials, whose work was proscribed by the Nazis. Hill’s assessment (which is also a self-assessment) is sober. Having in mind the grim sacrifice made by the July plotters against Hitler in 1944, he finds the description of Barlach as “Artist Against the Third Reich / something of a misnomer. You tried to buy time / and stave off catastrophe as I would have done; / you were not Haeften nor could I have been.” Elsewhere, when Hill declares “Culture is a dead word”, he has in mind not only the contemporary artistic abuses committed in its name, and those to which the word itself is daily subjected, but also its complicity in more terrible events, as imagined in a famous earlier poem, Ovid in the Third Reich, where the Roman poet anticipates Donald Rumsfeld: “Things happen”, and there is no escaping them.

Just when it seems that despite its popularity history is about to be eradicated as a subject in schools, Hill, for whom the past is continually present in imagination, brings to mind Cicero’s unanswerable declaration: “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.” And literature and history are inseparable, as Hill’s reflections here on Bacon, Burke and Blake demonstrate. For many readers Hill must seem a reactionary, and the demeanour of some of his enthusiasts lends weight to that view, but contemporary reactionary thought is parochial, repetitive and short on detail. Whether you agree with Hill or not, those are not faults of which A Treatise of Civil Power could fairly be accused.

A TREATISE OF CIVIL POWER by Geoffrey Hill
Penguin £9.99 pp64
Buy the book here at the offer price of £9.49 (inc p&p)

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