At stake is not so much the content of any of Hill’s perjured statements, but rather, the conditions that would make perjury possible: the problem of whether poetic language should be taken seriously enough to warrant this term. In both this collection and his broadly contemporaneous lectures, a rueful self-admonition deepens the marginalised, even clown-like persona he started to cultivate in the 1990s. His lecture on poetic perjury proposes, for instance, that his concern with ‘original sin’ ‘must place [him] among a marginalia of weirdos’. Many of the new poems continue with his references to ‘clown-comedy’: in a reflection on his career, for example, clown becomes a verb for poetic speech as well as a noun: ‘he clowned / his verses rather than recited them.’ Similarly, the characteristically black puns on ‘disarmed’ and ‘attraction’ manifests the lairy comedy under examination in his suggestion that ‘[a]s self-description / Three-legg’d Acrobat / Has its attraction. I would be disarmed …’ It is, however, the ultimate gravity of his claims that gives Hill’s writing its self-cancelling comic exorbitance. This means that in these late poems in particular, Hill seems to be daring us to take him seriously, and, at the same time, daring us not to.

Crucial to this gambit is Hill’s intensified work with the terminology of speech acts. His history of engagement with J.L. Austin is long, but these most recent collections – The Daybooks (2007–12), the revised Pindarics (2005–12) and Ludo (2011), all of which are collected here – show an unprecedented density of references to speech acts, and an unprecedented role for them in his negotiation between civic self-assertion and self-negation. The first poem in ‘Expostulations on the Volcano’ raises large and characteristic questions about readership and reception. It mockingly casts the poetic speaker with his rebarbative reputation as the big bad wolf (‘how anachronistic you are, Uncle’), and makes references to performative language in phrases like ‘I offer evidence’ and ‘my vow’. The deadly unseriousness of this poem emerges in its denying of its own speech acts in the last stanza: ‘Not that I mean my word: in truth my vow.’ This is representative of many of his engagements with the language of speech acts, which, in their riven ambivalence, encapsulate his posture of doomed hope in ‘well-versed public acts’.

Hill’s performative language rarely emerges in Austin’s first-person indicative form. When he makes reference to the words used in speech acts, he frequently offers them as conditionals (‘you would rehearse me if I stood my brief’) or imperatives (‘claim that it rises’). This has the effect of distancing the speech act from the immediate moment of poetic utterance – the acts become hypotheticals, imagined or ordered future gestures. Sometimes the speech acts are not only provisional but denied in moments of teasing apophasis: ‘I would not recommend / reading your own foreboding to the end; I cannot say where equity is found.’ They bolster the larger sense of provisionality which characterises his poems about poetics, which take a similarly conditional cast: ‘I would bestow / in long lines halting near side of the grave’s / Loquations’; ‘Attention is a type of stupor / I could almost believe.’   This line is of particular interest as it calls into question one of Hill’s most fiercely defended values (attention), asking if his long-cherished attentiveness might be just another form of anaesthesia, before destabilising the questioning itself: is the object of belief the stupor itself or the notion of attention as a kind of stupor And how much belief is left after the ‘almost’ and the ‘could’? Hill thus denatures his own speech acts through this conditionality of tense and voice, and such gestures of provisionality encapsulate both his hopes and his attendant reservations about the ultimate civic weight of poetic utterance.

Hill’s uncompromising self-censure in his most recent work is typical in that this practice intensifies some of the characteristics of his earlier writing but without diverging from it too abruptly. As Colin Burrow has noted, Hill resents facile attempts to divide his work into neat stages, and in some of his most recent poetry he mocks the critical nostalgia for his ‘marvellous early poems’. While some of the new work in The Daybooks continues the more alienating practices of the 1990s, it is important that this late group, in itself representing a substantial proportion of the collection, not be taken as a unified block. There are more continuities with earlier work in some of The Daybooks than there are in others. Hill’s descriptions of landscapes in ‘Expostulations on the Volcano’ and ‘Odi Barbare’ in particular are especially reminiscent of some of the pre-1990s poems. They are at the same time distinguished by their own collective habits, in particular their honouring of the inherently perspectival way in which we must encounter nature. He notes how the appearance of any tree, blade of grass, or building exists subject to specific conditions of wind and light which derive from particular seasons or times of day: ‘It is All Souls’ Eve and one damson tree / Stands as miser to its wiltering leaves’; ‘winter-clogged bushes as the sun arises’, ‘late October, a tide smouldering / Back under the wind’; ‘Clouds I call grey-coppery early mornings / Fused with sun-shot fog’. This is ‘Evanescent England, its display, / Whichever way I play it, not final’.

The same lack of finality might be observed in Hill’s work itself, as the last page of the volume cuts against the air of definitiveness in such a complete collected poems by finishing with a poem that is itself grammatically unfinished. The poem concludes with a phrase lacking any final punctuation: the reader, like the speaker, is left ‘on the verge’, propelled into the white space with fitting momentum.