Hill, Geoffrey

Bird Coloration, Volume 1, Mechanisms and Measurements

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Bird Coloration, Volume 1, Mechanisms and Measurements

Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Bird Coloration, Volume 2, Function and Evolution
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The Evolution of Animal Communication: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems (Monographs in Behavior and Ecology)
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Cornell Lab of Ornithology Handbook of Bird Biology

ASIN: 0674018931

Book Description

One cannot help being struck with wonder at the vivid pink of 10,000 flamingos rising from Lake Nakuru or the glowing red gorget of a ruby-throated hummingbird feeding outside the kitchen window. How birds produce the brilliant and striking coloration of their feathers and other body parts is the focus of this first volume of Bird Coloration. It has been more than 40 years since the mechanisms of color production of birds have been reviewed and synthesized and in those 40 years new pigments have been discovered, new genetic mechanisms have been described, new theories have been developed, and hundreds of new experiments have been conducted.

Geoffrey Hill and Kevin McGraw have assembled the world's leading experts in perception, measurement, and control of bird coloration to contribute to this book. This sumptuously illustrated volume synthesizes more than 1,500 technical papers in this field. The focus is on the three primary mechanisms of color production--melanin pigmentation, carotenoid pigmentation, and structural coloration--but less common as well as newly described mechanisms of color production are also reviewed in detail. The visual perception of birds and the best ways to collect and analyze color data are, for the first time, presented as part of the review of mechanisms of coloration. This book will be essential reading for biologists studying animal coloration, but it will also be treasured by anyone curious about how birds produce and perceive their bold and brilliant color displays. 

Bird Coloration, Volume 2, Function and Evolution
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Bird Coloration, Volume 2, Function and Evolution

Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Evolution | Science | Subjects | Books
Ornithology | Zoology | Biological Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books
General | Evolution | Professional Science | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
Birds | Field Guides | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books
General | Birdwatching | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books
Reference | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books
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Similar Items:

Bird Coloration, Volume 1, Mechanisms and Measurements

Birds and Climate Change

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The Evolution of Animal Communication: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems (Monographs in Behavior and Ecology)

Cornell Lab of Ornithology Handbook of Bird Biology

ASIN: 0674021762

Book Description

In this companion volume to Bird Coloration: Volume 1, Mechanisms and Measurements, Geoffrey E. Hill and Kevin J. McGraw have assembled some of the world's leading experts in the function and evolution of bird coloration to contribute to a long-overdue synthesis of a burgeoning field of inquiry. In Volume 2, the authors turn from the problem of how birds see and produce color and how researchers measure it, to what is the function of the colorful displays of birds and what are the factors that shape the evolution of color signals.

The contributors to this volume begin by examining the function of coloration in a variety of contexts from mate choice, to social signaling, to individual recognition, synthesizing a vast amount of recent findings by researchers around the world. The volume and the series conclude with chapters that consider coloration from an explicitly evolutionary perspective, examining selective pressures that have led to the evolution of colors and patterns on body and plumage. These functional and evolutionary studies build from research on mechanisms of production and controls of expression, covered in the previous volume, bringing the study of color full circle.

This sumptuously illustrated book will be essential reading for biologists studying animal coloration, but it will also be treasured by anyone curious about why birds are colorful and how they got that way. 

Speech! Speech!
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a difficult customer

difficult genius

A deep, disturbing work of poetry

Bug'rit! Millenium hand and shrimp!

Speech! Speech!
Geoffrey Hill
Manufacturer: Counterpoint
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Triumph of Love

The Orchards of Syon

Style and Faith: Essays

Canaan

Scenes from Comus

ASIN: 1582432406
Release Date: 2003-05-13

Book Description

With Daumier as his muse, Geoffrey Hill, "the best poet we have, assaults the emptiness of public discourse to which we have become accustomed."-- Evening Standard.

With our minds and ears fouled by degraded public speech--by media hype, insipid sermons, hollow political rhetoric, and the ritual misuse of words--how do we begin to think and speak honestly? At a time when our common language has been made false and ugly, how does the artist find words to communicate truth and beauty? These are the questions that Geoffrey Hill addresses in Speech! Speech!, a caustic, tragicomic tour de force that the London Guardian, naming it the poetry book of the year, called "magisterial--a classic of English poetry."

Customer Reviews:

a difficult customer.......2002-02-08

I think this book is aggressively critical in tone. In it, the author has a succession of negative things to say about the modern world. He especially does not like the media. He criticises musical forms like rap which he does not seem to know very much about. On the other hand, the book has quite a lot of memorable phrases, and sometimes it can make you laugh. It is the kind of book which leaves the reader with very mixed feelings.

difficult genius.......2001-02-05

The man is brilliant, but so difficult to get through. I would suggest having a handy reference section nearby. He has a beautiful way with words. The current volume is one long poem, divided into sections (in a similar way to "The Triumph of Love").

Hill will definitely become more widely appreciated as time wears on...

A deep, disturbing work of poetry.......2001-01-26

Geoffrey Hill is truly a poet's poet. His work is highly intellectual, peppered with references, and tersely worded. Behind the imposing verbal front, however, one finds a vast expanse of wry, analytical intelligence and an immense compassion for his fellow man. "Speech! Speech!" is Hill's newest book, which he describes as his "Inferno"; with his usual erudition and wit (as well as a fair amount of introspection), Hill examines the state of the media in today's world, and his relationship to it. His words tear through such topics as the death of Princess Diana, the BBC in his childhood, and the prevelence of rap. "Speech! Speech!" is a volume both of dissent and of hope; at times brutally honest, unbearably ugly, it is at the same time a testament to the redeeming and timeless power of poetry.

Bug'rit! Millenium hand and shrimp!.......2001-01-23

"Speech! Speech!" continues much in the mode of "The Triumph of Love": praise and lament "in different voices", a polyphonous essay into the stresses and strengths of the English language, its potential for wrought honesty as well as casual deception.

The poem's ethical obsession is with pitch, as opposed to tone: the making and upholding, in language, of difficult distinctions as opposed to - so far as it can be held distinct from - the equitable imperative smoothing-over of disputes and differends (the "healing" snake-oil of much contemporary political rhetoric). In illustration of this, as in obedience to it, "Speech! Speech!" bristles with split hairs. The defamatory satirical genius of the poem lies in its outrageous conflations, a wit that works insidiously, like guilt, by association. But its moral animus ("animus is what I home on, even as to pitch" - section 90) is focussed on those parts of speech where one is surprised to see distinctions being made, or remade - surprised that they should (still) be thought or seen to matter.

There are many places in the poem where it becomes difficult, important, to ascertain what is being driven at, from what angle (or angles) and with what force. So, in section 57, the speaker beckons:

Show you something. Shakespeare's elliptical late syntax renders clear the occlusions, calls us to account...

The reader of "Speech! Speech!" is similarly drawn to the places where Hill's elliptical verse indicates, but does not show, unaccounted-for ommissions, exclusions, losses. We are ordered to "[j]udge the distance" between generations, to take the measure of what Hill sees as the abrupt - overnight - pillage and erasure of a common heritage - "common" in a sense to be distinguished from, but not opposed to, that of "demotic". This is arguable, of course, and the poem argues with itself about it, about the meaning of "democracy" and the condescension of "the egalitarian anti-elitist SUN" (a widely-circulated British newspaper, whose language Hill parodies passim). Nevertheless, Hill seems genuinely shocked by the way that English culture has changed over the past fifty years, and is clearly contemptuous of the ability of electronic databases and the "world-surfing quote research / unquote of your average junk maestro" (cheers!) to replace the "forms of understanding, far from despicable, / and furthest now, as they are most despised" he celebrated in "The Triumph of Love" (section CXIX). His argument may be judged reactionary, but it is passionately made.

I have found it difficult to receive the verses of "Speech! Speech!" as Hill says they were intended - as praise-songs. What is being praised is presumably the faculty the poem itself aspires to, that of fashioning a language fit for human use out of the "acoustic din" of an indifferent mass culture. Or, rather, what is both praised and petitioned by "Speech! Speech!" is that part of ourselves that might find a use for such a language, that is too proud and attentive to be satisfied with less - that is healthy enough to curse. But sheer celebratory delight (not, for once, miscalled) is achieved only in brief epiphanic flushes, as if by concession: for the most part the dominant, almost ineluctable mood of the poem is one of sadness and anger.

Book Description

The last documented sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker--one of the rarest and most intriguing animals in the world--was noted over 50 years ago. Long thought to be extinct, the 2005 announcement of a sighting in Arkansas sparked tremendous enthusiasm and hope that this species could yet be saved. But the subsequent failure of a massive search to relocate Ivorybills in Arkansas made hope for the species' revival short-lived. Here, noted ornithologist Geoffrey Hill tells the story of how he and two of his colleagues stumbled upon what may be a breeding population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the swamps of northern Florida. He relates their laborious attempts to document irrefutable evidence for the existence of this shy, elusive bird following the failure of a much larger research team to definitively prove the bird's existence. Hill tells of his travails both in and out of the vast swamp wilderness, pulling back the curtain to reveal the little-seen political maneuvering that is part of all modern science. He explains how he and his group decided who to exclude or include as their findings came in, and why they felt the need to keep their search a secret. Hill returns repeatedly to how expectations can guide observations, and how tempting it is to oversell evidence in the face of the struggle between an overwhelming desire to find the bird and the need to retain integrity and objectivity. Written like a good detective story, Ivorybill Hunters also delves into the science behind the rediscovery of a species, explaining how professional ornithologists follow up on a sight record of a rare bird, and how this differs from the public's perception of how scientists actually work. Hill notes the growing role of amateurs in documenting bird activity and discusses how the community of birders and nature lovers can see, enjoy, and help preserve these birds. Ivorybill Hunters will prove a fascinating read for those with an interest in natural history, adventure, environmental conservation, and science, as well as the more than forty-six million Americans who now call themselves birdwatchers.

Customer Reviews:

Chasing after hope on a feather.......2007-05-05

I remember hearing news of an ivorybill sighting in 2005, followed up by purported sound recordings of the formerly extinct species and then fleeting video footage. Since then, several research teams and amateur birders have claimed sightings, but none have captured definitive proof of the bird's existence.

Throughout all the debate, excitement, speculation and accusations, two things struck me: First, Nature never fails to surprise, and second, the passions of people also never fail to surprise.

Now we have the story of the (maybe) resurrection of a thought-to-be-lost species by one of its hunters, Professor Geoffrey E. Hill, who was part of a 2005/2006 Florida search team that found tantalizing evidence but no definitive proof of ivorybills in the forests around the Choctawhatchee river.

"Ivorybill Hunters" reads like a good detective novel filled with political intrigue, clashing agendas, and a forest of tantalizing leads, most of which ended up as dead ends. The ivorybill has taken on such a mythic status that one could compare it to another famous bird, the Maltese Falcon, both of which are the stuff on which dreams, and in the case of the ivorybill, reputations and history, are made.

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Without Title
Geoffrey Hill
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Scenes from Comus
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ASIN: 0300121571

Book Description

Praise for Geoffrey Hill’s newest collection of poems:
“Without Title, his new collection, combines the force and freedom of Hill's narrative verse with a renewed faith in his masterly talents for form and wordplay. The result is alarmingly good; a collection of lyrics on the difficulties of ageing, the problems of belief and the vagaries of language bracketing a sequence of pindarics in which Hill, ostensibly responding to thoughts of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese, meditates at length on both their lives and considers the place of a poet in the world.”—Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday

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Scenes from Comus
Geoffrey Hill
Manufacturer: Penguin Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Without Title
Style and Faith: Essays
Speech! Speech!
The Orchards of Syon
The Triumph of Love

ASIN: 0141020237

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An excellent collection that will take some digestion
A nobbled vernacular?
challenging reading; not for the timid

NEW & COLLCTD POEMS 1952-92 CL
Geoffrey Hill
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Triumph of Love
Style and Faith: Essays
Speech! Speech!
Canaan
The Orchards of Syon

ASIN: 0395680875

Book Description

This volume brings together poems from four decades of Geoffrey Hill's work.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent collection that will take some digestion.......2001-07-04

Here, collected in one volume, are Geoffrey Hill's first five books of poetry (For the Unfallen, King Log, Mercian Hymns, Tenebrae, and the Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy), plus a few early versions of poems that later appeared in Canaan. For those who are not yet familiar with Hill's works, this would be the obvious place to start, since his last two works (Speech! Speech!, and The Triumph of Love) are both difficult book length poems, and "Canaan" is not necessarily any easier.

Not that these poems are easy, not even the ones Hill wrote when he was 19 (like "Genesis", the opening poem of the collection). What they are is challenging, beautiful, thoughtful, at times meditative, at times lyrical, often skeptical, almost always wonderful.

These are poems written for those who love poetry and don't mind if it's hard, who can reread a poem ten times in order to appreciate it, who have the patience to learn to read a real poet. Although this book is only 200+ pages, there is a lifetime (almost!) of reflection contained within it, from the early poems reflecting on art, responsibility, history and war in "For the Unfallen", to the funeral music of "King Log", the beautiful prose poems of "Mercian Hymns", and the deeply religious "Tenebrae".

Give it some time. Don't judge it too quickly. Hill will certainly be remembered as one of the greatest poets of the 20th and early 21st centuries, as one who recognized the heavy responsibility of a poet in our times.

A nobbled vernacular?.......2000-08-21

Or a nobbly vernacular? Perhaps a knackered vernacular. Hill's poetry speaks a language not far removed from the ordinary, right up against it even: "not strangeness, but strange likeness". Uncommonly strange. "Simple, sensuous and direct": a likely story. For "direct" read "dialect", in a poor comedian's travesty of a Chinese accent. But this is poetry that goes to the roots, by one route or another, like an underground map of the English language. There is - believe me - nothing abstract or effete about it (laughter). What you have to know to read it is how to go on reading even when you don't know what you have to know. Now go and read it.

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challenging reading; not for the timid.......1998-01-15

Geoffrey Hill is among the best three or four British poets of his generation. His poems are challenging: they require a strong knowledge of history, religion, and literary allusions, as well as the decipherment of thorny syntax and obscure symbolism. But to interpret these traits as weaknesses would be mistaken. One can continue to read verse in the colloquial, Blake/Wordsworth/Frost/Williams tradition ... or one can tackle poetry which requires real effort to understand it. Hill offers the latter.

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Selected Poems
Geoffrey Hill
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Without Title
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

ASIN: 014102500X

Average customer rating:

Brilliant!
Erudite but bizarre
An important collection of previously published articles

Style and Faith: Essays
Geoffrey Hill
Manufacturer: Counterpoint LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Triumph of Love
Speech! Speech!
The Orchards of Syon
Canaan
Scenes from Comus

ASIN: 1582431078
Release Date: 2003-05-13

Customer Reviews:

Brilliant!.......2007-01-11

John Hollander calls Hill "the finest British poet of our time." The praise is worthilly placed. He is a powerful force in the realm of literary thought, and beyond. Any souls who have read the essayist work of Dorothy Sayers or G.K Chesterton will find in these pages of Hill a literary kinship of souls. Although their ideas may differ, one can easilly imagine these three essayists gathered around the same table exchanging vigorous thoughts. Hill seems to possess the temperament of ruggedness with contemplation that is Seamus Heaney.

Some of the previous reviewers criticized the essays as lacking coherence; they forget these are essays, not a formal treatise. The essays are Hill's look from various angles and postures of thought along one line of thought.

As far as what one reviewer referred to as his crankiness, it is refreshing to find a contemporary writer standing firmly upon thoughts not influenced merely by the latest literary fads. In this way he is, as all the best artists, brilliantly and refreshingly original.

Erudite but bizarre.......2004-10-23

I was introduced to Geoffrey Hill, both as poet and critic, by a friend whom I told of my love for 17th-century English literature. Style and Faith has only deepened this love, but it was an entangling, rather than enchanting, encounter for me.

I found Hill to be at his best when he tackles the literature directly, as in the essay on Vaughn's "Night" and, to a lesser degree, the essay paralleling Hooker and Burton. Hill's gratitude for this literary and spiritual heritage is profound and infectious. In addition, the bibliographical reach of the book is wonderful and has led me to make many further related purchases.

But his loyalty to these distant icons of an age with a greatly different "pitch" than ours can handicap Hill as well. This shows most in his book reviews, which, though pointed and learned, are impossibly crabbed and narrow. For instance, while there is no doubt (in my mind, at least) that the power of Scripture as written in English is closely dependent on the translator's style, to insist, as Hill does, that it is an abomination of the highest order to publish Tyndale's New Testament with modern spelling is patently ridiculous. Style and faith are definitely linked, but faith and orthography are not.

Nevertheless, there are few critics writing for the public who are as steeped in our literary inheritance as Hill, and these essays, while erratic, are highly valuable.

An important collection of previously published articles.......2003-05-25

Geoffrey Hill is most commonly recognised as one of the most difficult, and important, poets of our day. Born in Bromsgrove, England, in 1932, Hill has written several volumes of excellent poetry. However, he is also a first-class literary historian and critic, as is evident from this collection of seven previously published articles, which date from 1989 to 1999. Five of them stem from the Times Literary Supplement, such as the first two, which are review articles on the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, in 1989, and on a 'modernized spelling' version of Tyndale's bible, and the Revised English Bible, a new translation. With a skill few others could hope to match, Hill weighs the value and inadequacies of the works. Other articles include a rumination on Henry Vaughan's "The Night" and other forays into 16th and 17th century literature, his area of expertise.

While I would heartily recommend Hill's first two volumes of criticism, "The Lords of Limit", and "The Enemy's Country", to anyone interested in poetry, 16th/17th century literature, or Geoffrey Hill himself, it is harder to unreservedly praise this latest offering. This is not because it offers "nothing new" -- that is not my chief reservation. It is rather that the selection seems at times to lack coherence. One would have liked to have had perhaps another article, written especially for this volume, or at least an introduction of sorts that placed the individual essays in relation to one another and to the poet-critic's work as a whole.

Customer Reviews:

Patience hardens.......2000-08-15

This is unmistakeably Hill's _Brand_: the technical grace of his Englishing of Ibsen shows an acute awareness of the responsibility of the translator to both the original text and the language into which it is to be translated. Hill's translation enriches not only the English language but the ability of English (and non-Norwegian) speakers to appreciate Ibsen's brooding, symbolically charged drama of the challenge of faith in the midst of common life. Is Brand's fidelity to his "dear Christ hurt with thorns" obdurate or obstinate? In this play, the repudiation of social morality in the name of higher things is put to the question: what if devotion to such "higher things" also leads to, or becomes a mask for, moral isolation, the cauterization of social feeling? Uncompromising and yet compromised, Brand is a caution, and _Brand_ a cautionary tale...

The "Good" Ibsen.......2000-06-06

Brand is the flip side of Peer Gynt. Ibsen may well have intended to write heroism into Brand, a charismatic dissenting priest, but could not breathe any life into his protagonist at all. Brand is cold, righteous, merciless, uncompromising. The play is dated, dull, static, but of historical interest to Ibsen scholars, since he may have learned plenty by writing Brand. The rather rigid Norwegian state/church of his time loved it, granted Henrik a permanent poet stipend for Brand. Modern gentle readers may roll their eyes.

One of the best books I have read...........2000-03-09

This book captures the essence of humanity. I recommend to anyone who wants to find themself.

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