Whether one's faith is in the Word or words, God, man or the Muses, Tenebrae calls forth a troubled alleluia. For what is to be praised? God's Light, the lean luxury of human reason, or the festive brilliance of art? ["Tenebrae"] means shadows or darkness in Latin and in the Christian lexicon refers to the darkness at the crucifixion.] Is the darkness of the title our national apostasy, the shadows of middle-age, or obscurity that baffles understanding? If we receive the book as a choral celebration of sacred and profane Love, what are we to make of the character of such a Love in Hill's work as a violent and merciless assault? This book is Hill's most dreadful and abrupt commingling.

The book gathers-in and sharpens-up contradictions as if to make a sum of human disunity, revealing in such purposive concentration its formal design as a poetic...