“The Word has been abroad, is back, with a tanned look”, wrote Geoffrey Hill, long before entering the fallow period that must have seriously worried his many admirers. Having established a ruthlessly sharp alloy of sound and scholarship with For the Unfallen (1959) and King Log (1968), having unearthed the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia in Mercian Hymns (1971), and having written some of the most agonisingly beautiful poetry of the twentieth-century in Tenebrae (1978), the output more or less stopped. Scrupulous criticism still came, but it looked as if the slim New and Collected Poems was to be the final word.

Then the floodgates opened. The poetry world pricked up its ears at the arrival of Canaan in 1996: since then the trickle has turned into a torrent. Ten more volumes followed, and Broken Hierarchies even boasts two previously unpublished works.

This monolithic book is a 933-page covenant with the English language. Registers give and take as Holy Lands mix with England. There can’t be many landscapes more persuasive than: “Shafts from the winter sun homing upon earth’s rim.”

The most common and the least interesting adjective applied to Hill’s writing is ‘difficult’, and it is true that a huge intellect and a rigorous technique meet in poems of great density (and, often, great humour). The main concern of the later work is language itself: “Weight of the world, weight of the word, is”, is arguably Hill’s most sacred creed.

Language is interrogated; no subterranean meaning escapes exposure, no word is treated as simple. The voice is self-reflexive and cerebral: “Time, here renewed / ás tíme, hów it páces and salútes ús in its ways.” But at the heart of that self-reflection and linguistic discipline remains a lyricist who sings in time with the universe and the human heart. “Caccini’s Amarilli I would play / At school assemblies, a scuffed seventy-eight / Bucking the needle, churning sweet disquiet. / Our loves are dying, we have had our day.”

The word may have been abroad, but it’s back now.