Puns, puzzles and dirty jokes

Now in his seventieth year, with half a century of prodigious work behind him, the poet Geoffrey Hill is assured of a public. This assurance is part of the plight of his new poem, the third major work he has given us since, as he recently told the audience of Radio 3's Nightwaves, his writer's block was lifted by anti-depressants, his "harp of nerves" tuned again, in the words of his own verse, "on lithium". Speech! Speech! is an awe-inspiring feat of sustained poetic thought, a single poem in 120 stanzas which enacts what Hill describes elsewhere as the "death-struggle" in which poet and public are bound to engage.

In his remarkable lectures on the role of poetry in public life, Hill has often expressed open resentment towards audiences who would rather "smear disgusting empathy" over works of art than give them the "humble attention" they are due; who despise the learning that "enables", though it may not "secure", "forms of understanding". "Any significant writer," he said last year in a BBC lecture on Shakespeare's Coriolanus, has to cope with "our demand for 'relevance' and instant 'accessibility'."

In Speech! Speech!, Hill's engagement with what "PEOPLE" regard as "relevant" and "accessible" is both ferocious and controlled. The audience, clamouring, heckling or laughing on cue, is ubiquitous. World-class empathy-smearers of our age populate the verse. Bill Clinton "(Rum place for a cigar, Herr Präsident)", and Tony Blair, the "man in too-tight shoes" reading Corinthians at Princess Diana's funeral, share the stage with the Marquis de Sade, the Hebrew prophets and Saint Augustine.

Theological inquiry mixes with political satire and "filthy talk": "End of scholastic disputation. Now the theatricals:/ enter SCATOLOGY, dancing, with DESIRE." A challenge is thrown down to our "spielers of abuse", to "RAPMASTER", the poet's "evil twin": "I wíll/ mátch you fake pindaric for trite/ violence." The woman-hating "discharge" of rap is interlaced with cadences of devotion: "Teach patience,/ SISTER PERVERSITY; how I desired your/ variant dolours. FRÍGID BÍTCH DOLORES!"

Among the poem's public spectacles is the struggle within a scrupulous and demanding private conscience; the verse has the tortuous vigilance of a spiritual exercise, treading the dangerous line between self-examination and self-regard, between humility and pride.

One of its countless personae is John Bunyan's pilgrim, struggling up the "Hill Difficulty". Hill's pun on his own name is one of thousands in this riddling work, which plays on every kind of word-game: scrabble-charades, crosswords, anagrams, palindromes, wartime cryptanalysis and dirty jokes.

Hill creates extraordinary "slow double-takes" within words and lines and across stanzas. The strange death and funeral rites of "England's daughter", the "huntress" Diana, come in and out of focus, in sequences alternately meditative and coarse: "Where ·re we? Lourdes? SOME sodding mystery tour./ Wh·t do you mean a break? Pisses me off./ Great singer Elton John though. CHRIST/ ALMIGHTY - even the buses are kneeling!"

Towards the end, through the intercession of another " Northampton Madonna" - Henry Moore's sculpture of that name - this "global" occasion of "mass consent" is retuned into a contemplation of English devotional art. The poem is full of grace, too; Hill seeks out miracle in the ruins of history and language-in the body's failure, and in minutiae of the natural world, like "mistletoe ravelling the winter boughs/ with nests that shine."

In The Triumph of Love, to which this poem is a sequel, Laurel and Hardy routines are described as "flawless shambles"; "cutting, pacing, repacing", edited with genius. Here, poetic work is a "shambles of peripeteia", a sequence, cut and paced, at once flawless and embarrassing, of verbal pratfalls, upendings and surprises, whose ultimate purpose is "to discover/history íf not to make it".

This disclaimer notwithstanding, Hill has played a leading role in making the literary history of our epoch. Now, in his verse, he is making a "good ending", working with undiminished urgency, agility, and power.