MLR, ., e Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin. By G H. Ed. by K- H. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Old age, as Helen Small reminds us, involves something other than more of the same (e Long Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, )). Geoffrey Hill’s final collection, as a planned posthumous work, has a similarly distinctive status: it takes on a summative and definitional weight, offering something of a retrospective key to earlier writing. In some ways, the collection is ‘more of the same’, in that it continues Hill’s long-standing exploration of ideas such as civil power, memorialization, inheritance, intrinsic value, and the ersatz economy of literary renown. Where this collection differs, however, is in its procedural meditation on interpretation itself. Specifically, e Book of Baruch prompts the reader to consider how certain associative processes become particularly important in the face of difficulty: processes such as attending to juxtaposition, hearing rhyme, and deciphering various forms of code. To interpret in the face of difficulty is always to put pressure on proximity: to consider how juxtaposition, in setting discordant elements together, produces something new. e preceding collections in Hill’s later period (beginning in around with Without Title) were mostly characterized by a thoroughgoing mode of opacity in which discords were built word on word. In this book, however, many poems contain lines which are in themselves highly lucid and fluent: the difficulty here comes not from the relations between words inside a line but from the fugue-like separation of the lines themselves. Poem offers an illustrative example of lines that are in themselves relatively straightforward but not easy to connect: ‘Again the apple in full flesh, again the fretty-leaved lime | e half acceptance of mythical time. | ree weeks or so out of that clash with delirium in the old men’s crèche’ (p. ). e juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated words can suggest a new concept or a new connection between existing ones; but here this happens on the level of the whole line and its neighbours. e reader’s wrestle with long-standing Hillian questions of difficulty therefore continues in this collection but takes place on a newly expanded scale. Sometimes the contrast between the lucid individual line and the opaque larger poem derives not from the line’s juxtaposition with surrounding ones but from its own larger implications. Various lines in the collection contrast declarative simplicity with gnomic overall ideas: they start with the sure diction of the definition before dissipating into riddle. e following line from Poem , for instance, has the structure of a clarification but a surreal vocabulary: ‘Scansion is repetition in pattern; and an enduring mansion’ (p. ). e ringing exactitude of many of the book’s rhymes works with this new lucidity to reinforce the strong contrast between the discordance separating lines and their ultimate closeness, spatial and aural. In this collection, sonic echoes become especially pointed: ‘shut down like a reactor because of the stress factor’ in Poem (p. ), ‘wealth, entitlement and open stealth’ in Poem (p. ). Sometimes Reviews Hill takes this to the point of comedy, as in his description of Hopkins in Poem as ‘a Parnassian and a sassy man’, helped by the metre’s syncopated verve, which lands hard on the ‘sass’ in ‘sassy’ (p. ). Like juxtapositions and rhymes, keys and codes become particularly important in the book’s retrospective meditation on difficulty. roughout his career, Hill used a personalized and oen idiosyncratic shorthand. Sometimes this takes the form of metaphysically resonant keywords (‘gravity’, ‘plutocracy’, ‘instrinsic’, ‘eccentric’, ‘marginal’); sometimes this involves exemplary figures—Southwell for the recusant, Weil for the ascetic, Bacon for the culpably decorous apologist for inequality. In, most obviously, Clavics, this individuated synecdoche took the form of a reflection on keys. is preoccupation emerges in the final collection in the form of playfully direct references, as in this line from Poem : ‘Where I last saw Berkeley’s spare keys to the code’ (p. ). Sometimes these direct references even have him self-reflexively alluding to his own use of codes in the given line, as in...