Thirty prose-poems in which Hill conflates Offa, the 8th-century Mercian king who built the dyke dividing England from Wales, with his own Worcestershire childhood. The result is a meditation on power, memory, and the brutality underlying English civilization. Hill is the most demanding and most rewarding of postwar British poets; his difficulty is moral, not decorative. The T.S. Eliot Prize later recognized his entire body of work. Mercian Hymns is his most accessible masterwork.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.