"The first of the four books began as a result of my coming face to face with Donatello's Habakkuk in Florence in May 2007. The second derives from a rediscovery of the power and beauty of one of Sir Philip Sidney's lyrics in Arcadia, a demanding technical exercise in English ‘Sapphics'. The third is a book about my ‘discovery' of Wales, dedicated to the memory of my Welsh great-grandfather. The fourth is again an exercise in handling rhyme, metre, rhythm — in short, ‘stress' — within the constraints of compact metrics and complex rhyme-patterns. The fifth, I don't feel able to talk about, as it's unfinished."

I like to think that my wife and I contributed something to the Welsh book, Oraclau. Driving last May with Geoffrey from Cambridge to Wales, we stopped at Llanllwchaiarn, near Newtown, where his great- grandfather was baptised in 1826. The church was, predictably, locked, so we wandered round the graveyard. "Who is that strange figure with the long white beard who kept walking in front of the camera?" Geoffrey asked when we showed him the printed photos.

En route to Llanllwchaiarn, we had driven past Bromsgrove County High School, in Worcestershire, where Geoffrey had been a pupil from 1942 to 1950. "We were," he said, "95 per cent working class, and I am very proud of what the majority of my classmates achieved in later life. The boy who was my closest friend in the ‘L' (for Latin) stream and who, having done very well at School Cert, left to work in an office, retired a few years ago as Professor of Chemical Engineering at Zurich with a DSc and numerous patents to his name. That is what I call genius. In terms of success, recognition, stability and personal happiness, I come a long way down the list of ex-pupils of BCHS in those years. As to my being a poet: at 78 [almost] I have to grit my teeth and get on with it. I would rather have been a Professor of Engineering and a more generous and loving son."

This, I thought to myself, is the man of whom Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote: "Geoffrey Hill remains for me the supreme voice of the last few decades...The recent work, telegraphic, angry and unconsoled, at once assertive and self-dispossessing, is extraordinary." So, too, is the gap between the strength of the public recognition and the bleakness of the personal judgment.

"Say that I am gifted — ," one of the poems in Scenes from Comus (2005) declares, "and I'll touch you/for ordinary uncommon happiness. What/a weirdo, you think. Well, yes, I was wired weird." 

Were you, Geoffrey, I ask, "wired weird"?