A rueful but defiant self-dismantling …

… Rabelais and the likely lads | David Womersley | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

One of Hill’s more unexpected comments on the “condition of England” theme that runs through the book is that “our flame of genius appears sunk, now that Dave Bowie has signed into the tomb with his very considerable panache and aplomb” (poem 233). No irony here, for all that I can see. Hill may have recognised a general parallel to what he was undertaking in The Book of Baruch in Bowie’s own careful and stylish synchronising of an artistic valediction with physical death. The co-ordination of the tomb with aplomb was evidently at the forefront of Hill’s mind, too.