environment and space 137man part of the world, an “Other” that we are barely beginning to
be able to know’.^11
A POETICS OF PLACE: GEOFFREY HILL, ROBERT HASS
AND ANNE SZUMIGALSKI
According to Buell, place is ‘a confi guration of highly fl exible
subjective, social and material dimensions’.^12 He explains that
for political geographer John Agnew, ‘place’ can be understood
as ‘a matter of (social) “locale”, (geographical) “location” and a
sense of place. It combines elements of nature (elemental forces),
social relations (class gender and so on), and meaning (the mind,
ideas, symbols)’ (p. 60 ). While place can also evoke a physical
relationship to the environment, or indeed ‘a physical site’, it
also implies emotional and cognitive relationships – what Agnew
refers to as ‘a deeply personal phenomenon founded on one’s life
world and everyday practices’ (p. 60 ). A confi guration of place is
also informed by ‘the plural geographies associated with ethnic,
political, economic, informational, cultural and religious forma-
tions’ (p. 60 ). As has been initially suggested in a cursory reading
of Lefebvre, place also exerts effects on its inhabitants. Agnew
concurs that ‘those constructs are themselves, in turn, mediated
ecologically by the physical environments that they also mediate’
(p. 60 ).
Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns ( 1971 ), takes as its geographi-
cal locus a specifi c area – the valley of the River Trent and its
tributaries, once known as Mercia but now known as the English
Midlands.^13 It has been suggested that the original old English
‘Mierce’ means border people. The book is written as a sequence
of thirty discrete verses that Hill refers to as ‘versets’, which he
describes as groupings of ‘rhythmical prose’:
The rhythm and cadence are far more of a pitched and tuned
chant than I think one normally associates with the prose
poem. I designed the appearance of the page in the form of
versets. The reason they take the form they do is because
at a very early stage the words and phrases begin to group