The Hill

Courageous, threatening, and often splendid in its brooding poetry, The Hill is like no record you've ever heard. Buckner fuses 18 poems from Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology--an early 20th-century collection based on the tortured memories of the dead of a fictional Illinois town--into one long, spiraling descent into the dark corners of the human condition. There's anguish, violence, betrayal, and a lot of death here, but also some riveting, savagely original music. Buckner orchestrates his droning guitars and phantasmal keyboards with Calexico's bass, cello, and percussion. Like the themes, the music is somber but somehow opulent and graceful, often profoundly spiritual. Through it all Buckner's hoarse, glowering moan redeems these lost hunters, rounders, wives, and mothers. "In death therefore I am avenged," Buckner wails in the a cappella "Ollie McGee." In this demanding, hieratic epic, so too is Richard Buckner. --Roy Kasten