It's blackthorn time here in southern suburbia. Every patch of waste and scrub is suddenly white with these joyful early blossoms. It's the only time we notice this otherwise undistinguished shrub with its spiny black branches (hence the apparently contradictory name), unless we go picking sloes for sloe gin. Blackthorn, so abundant in the hedgerows of the farmed and hunted midlands, seems to me very much a Geoffrey Hill kind of shrub. Here it is in In The Valley of the Arrow, from Without Title:
... the singing iron footbridges, tight weirs
pebble-dashed with bright water, a shivey blackthorn's
clouded white glass that's darker veined or seamed,
crack willow foliage, pale as a new fern,
silver-plated ivy in the sun's angle - .
What an eye the man has - and what a vocabulary. Shivey, in case you're wondering, is wool cloth full of dark burrs and splinters (yes, much like Hill's verse).
