This issue of Stand celebrates new work by writers who have long been associated with the magazine. Michael Hamburger, friend and colleague of Jon Silkin from their earliest days in London, through his own poetry, his translations and his criticism has been a guardian and guide to our understanding of poetry in the context of European history and all that means. His translation of W. G. Sebald's After Nature has achieved justified acclaim and his own new book of poems, A Diary of Non-Events, is to be published shortly by Anvil. Geoffrey Hill celebrates his 70th birthday this summer and with it comes a continued flow of fresh, highly personal and revelatory poems. We are honoured to be publishing one third of Scenes from Comus, a book which is already completed and will follow The Orchards of Syon, itself already issued in the United States and due from Penguin in the UK in the Autumn. Hill's Scenes from Comus celebrates also the 70th birthday of the composer Hugh Wood whose own tone poem with that title was first heard in 1965. The relation between poetry and music here is vital. Jeffrey Wainwright's essay on Primo Levi presents a creative and illuminating context (I am reminded of the sub-title of The Enemy's Country, 'Words, contexture and other circumstances of language') to these poems by Hamburger and Hill, and others in this issue. We have included responses to Hill's recent work--both The Orchards of Syon and these poems from Scenes from Comus--showing surprise, shock even, and enjoyable engagement, together with appreciations of him as writer and colleague.

Stand has always been thought of as having a strong political stance. From 1960, when it was located first in Leeds, did it publish a poetry of the industrial North--the landscape of capitalism, mills, and conflict? Oddly, the landscape that seemed to me (when I first got to know their work in the 1960s) to unite Geoffrey Hill and Jon Silkin was that of the battlefield (1461) of Towton, south-east of York, the village of Acaster Malbis also near York, and Clifford's Tower in York (scene in 1190 of the enforced suicide of 800 Jews). Apparently individual and 'regional', nevertheless, the poems spoke out as part of an active dialogue in the languages, lives and deaths of Europe. And, in reflecting on Hill's sonnet sequence 'Funeral Music', that first appeared in Stand, Silkin's 'The Coldness', 'The Malabestia' and 'Resting Place', as well as Hamburger's and Wainwright's poems, I now see a strange logic in Hill's present exploration of the highly formalised and musical masque. Comus, a Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, is a poetry of the 'occasion', it assumes a drama of virtue and vice. As a presentation it involves those whose lives are celebrated both as amateur actors and real performers on the political scene. At the end, actors, musicians and audience merge in the dance. Hill's language is still, as it has always been, the language of dramatic address; and now, perhaps more clearly than ever, it is, through the gift of music, a shared language, not one of despairing, if defiant, solitude. There may still be every reason in the historic landscape of York to be frightened: 'All Europe is touched / With some of frigid York, / A York is now by Europe.' But Hill's voice still cries '"I have not finished".' We speak by invitation in this necessary drama too.

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