Geoffrey Hill has evolved [a] most unabashedly grand manner. Harold Bloom has called him "the strongest British poet now alive." He is impressive, though Mr. Bloom has overpraised him. In "Mercian Hymns" (1971), his sequence of prose poems, Mr. Hill often achieved a stark intensity of image and emotion that seldom emerges from the convolutions of his earlier, more formal poems. But now, in ["Tenebrae"], he has returned to the earlier mode. In its grip, he seems more intent on torturing his rhetoric into sublimity than on working out the stylistic implications of his material. "Tenebrae" deals with religious crisis; the difficulty of maintaining one's faith in a skeptical age. The poems treat this familiar post-Romantic theme with tremendous rhetorical energy, but without exceptional insight or subtlety. Consider "Martyrium," perhaps the best sonnet in the sequence "Lachrimae."… This poem is powerful, but a close reading uncovers more faults than...