So congratulations to Geoffrey Hill for getting the Oxford Professor of Poetry job, ahead of my friend Michael Horovitz. Hill is the certainly the better poet, though Michael would have been the better professor. Hill is famously obscure in his references: but within the Oxbridge poetry establishment, where L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E still has a lot of sway, he is comparatively straightforward in his surface meaning. I am rather tempted by Peter Porter's dictum: "All poetry is LANGUAGE poetry: but not all LANGUAGE poetry is poetry".
If you fancy catching up with Hill, get yourself a copy of his "New & Collected Poems 1952-1992". This isn't straightforward: my copy is ex-library from a US naval college. But if you can, head for Mercian Hymns, his most accessible entire collection. It's about Offa of Mercia (of Dyke fame), the first man to call himself (on charters around 774) "King of the Angles". But here Offa is a modern dark age monarch who gets phone calls and plays with model aeroplanes, as elements of him are drawn from Hill's own Midlands childhood.
If you persist with Hill, you will find yourself in the company of Osip Mandelstam, Charles Peguy and Asmodeus: what's not to like?
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