The view that Geoffrey Hill had from his childhood home in Worcestershire, west towards Wales, was almost exactly the prospect enjoyed by his fellow poet and son of Bromsgrove, AE Housman, when he was a boy 70 years earlier. That sight made a deep impression on both men. But while Housman’s poetic landscape was a distant and purely imagined Shropshire, Hill’s was rooted in the close texture and historical memory of his homeland, not only in Mercian Hymns, but in the precision and focus of collections such as the lyrical and tender Without Title and the Housman-like longing of sequences in his extensive poem The Orchards of Syon: “ …I / wish greatly to believe: that Bromsgrove was, and is, Goldengrove; that the Orchards / of Syon stand as I once glimpsed them”. Between teaching periods at Boston University, he returned to Worcestershire regularly when his wife, Alice Goodman, became a parish priest there.
