Without Title Geoffrey Hill Penguin, 82pp, £9.99 ISBN 0141020253

The fault line in Geoffrey Hill's poetry has always fallen between conscience and self-regard. His early books, sparse and infrequent as they were, seemed haunted by the difficulty of saying anything. The result, paradoxically, was a meditative poetry of rhetorical grandeur, riven with ambiguity. One had the sense of a poet striving to free the poem of his own personality, yet tempted by self-regard or self-contempt, anxious to test every word for possible duplicities.

In the late 1990s all that changed. Developments in Hill's life loosened his tongue, permitting a flow of self-disclosure he would formerly have shunned. He has become astonishingly productive: Without Title is his fifth book in eight years.

At the centre of the volume is an extended sequence called "Pindarics": a reference to the ancient Greek odes that honoured the victors in athletic games. Hill's sequence is interspersed with quotations from the Italian poet Cesare Pavese. When he addresses him, half-humorously, as "the second most self-centred man I know", the significance of the form begins to emerge. Hill invites us to weigh the poet's concern with ver-bal, ethical or political justice against his private vanity.

"Pindarics" becomes, at times, tediously self-referential, but much else in Without Title escapes the shortcomings of Hill's recent work. The book is less crabby than he has been of late, and there are several gratuitously beautiful lyrics that bypass the usual obsessions: a ravishing little poem, for instance, which teases out the meanings to be found in a Christmas crib:

Showings are not unknown: a six-winged seraph
somewhere impends - it is the geste of invention,
not the creative but the creator spirit.
The night air sings a colder spell to come.

"Showings" to translate epiphany, the ambiguity of "impend" and "spell", the French word "geste" (a performance, a gesture, a notable deed), the distinction between "creator" and "creative": these might have occurred in Hill's first book in 1959, but they are handled here with disarmingly effortless grace.

The first word in the book is the German traurig (sorrowful) and an atmosphere of wintry mourning pervades it: "mourning my meaning", as Hill puts it in one poem. But it is not a deadly atmosphere. On the contrary, despite the sense of loss and the usual struggles of conscience, Without Title is blessedly touched with transitory splendour: snow, winter sunlight and gleaming evergreens.

There are signs, moreover, that Hill in old age is beginning to enjoy himself, as in a series of "improvisations" - one of them dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, not an obvious pillar of the Hill pantheon - and in the gorgeous "Broken Hierarchies", which shares something of their spontaneity. These poems invoke music, which, as elsewhere in Hill, provides an escape from his characteristic anguish. As he says in "Pindarics": "music seems an answer, undisturbed/by other than itself". It is, as ever, in the music of his poetry that Hill resolves the tensions in his thought.

Clive Wilmer's new collection, The Mystery of Things, will be published in April by Carcanet

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