Michael Hofmann’s Selected Poems reviewed by Simon Pomery

Drawn from four books, and including seven new pieces, the Selected Poems of Michael Hofmann are an affront to the reader. From the beginning of his career he has sought to write poetry with 'the shape and texture of bricks'. In 1999, the same year as his most recent collection, Approximately Nowhere, he spoke to Thumbscrew, the late, great poetry magazine, and compared his work to that of fellow New Generation poets: 'My things looked dense, uncompromising, undifferentiated. The “brick” was to suggest utility, interchangeability, compactness, aggressiveness even. I began by despising most poetry for being archaic and mindless and ornamental and unnecessary. Of course, a lot of it still is.' In line with such artistic insight, his own poetry validates the truth in melancholy and the melancholy in truth.

A series of 'father-poems' inspired by, and sometimes addressed to, his father, the novelist Gert Hofmann (whose novels he has translated), provides a large part of Selected Poems. 'Family Holiday', from Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), shows the pull of family drama on the young poet: 'Every day I swam further out of my depth,/ but always, miserably, crawled back to safety'. But the father-poems properly begin with his second collection, Acrimony (1986). The title itself is a concept central to his work: animosity, bitterness among people, with a sense of the acrid and sinister. The affectionately-named 'Bärli', a German petname meaning 'little bear', opens out the drama from innocence to experience:

'Your salami breath tyrannised the bedroom
where you slept on the left, my mother, tidily,
on the right. I could cut the atmosphere with a knife:

the enthusiasm for spice, rawness, vigour,
in the choppy air. It was like your signature,
a rapid scrawl from the side of your pen -

individual, overwhelming, impossible -
a black Greek energy that cramped itself into
affectionate diminutives, Dein Vati, or Papi.   

Timing so perfect as that 'black Greek energy' made me think of Robert Lowell, an influential writer for Hofmann - Life-Studies casts its shadow, but Hofmann's voice remains his own. That 'energy' can be 'cramped' unifies the abstract with the concrete. This extremity of feeling reverberates through the whole work.

Some critics groan whenever Hofmann-senior appears, but their gripe, that poets should not write many poems on the same subject, exposes their failure to acknowledge how literature is made. From the Upanishads to Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet to V.S. Naipaul's South Bank Show interview('Ignore your contempories. Take your life seriously' etc.) it is taught that to look outside and not within yourself (principally, into your essence, where the real poem and its only possible author is found) is darkness. Hofmann has plunged very deeply into himself and found his own personal mythology: a kind of Telemachus-Odysseus complex, with the young poet-warrior never fully knowing who or where his father is, living in the shadow of unfathomable imaginative adventures:

'The point of tears is an hour away. You want to talk.
'He says, "I've done better with my life than you.
I've won many prizes, what have you got to show?"
We are competing tombstones, he puts me in the shadow' (my italics).

As in this unselected poem from Acrimony ('And the Teeth of the Children are Set on Edge'), the father is often the manifestation of Hofmann's worst fears, but in the drama across the Selected Poems this is balanced against the hope of freedom offered by his own writing life.

He is as successful in the father-poems as in poems significant in terms of social history. 'Changes' is a portrait of a lady in the time of Thatcher, comparable to the fearless but hopeless Marlene of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. It illustrates how the ideology of an age impacts upon the individual. Here is a tercet:

'Hard to take you in your new professional pride -
a salary, place of work, colleagues, corporate spirit -
your new femme d'affaires haircut, hard as nails.'

Satire leaks through the use of plosives. There is a latent invective spit in those clipped p's, the world of fast tracks and grad schemes, of 'corporate' 'colleagues', is exposed as worthless, the invective articulated through cussing c's. The phrase 'corporate spirit' draws attention to the genius below the surface of the quotidian: its Latinate prefix, 'cor-', means heart, 'corporate spirit' is oxymoronic, and the heartlessness of the beloved's Thatcherite uniform is exposed for what it is: on the surface she looks 'hard as nails', but beneath it her heart has shrunk to nothing. Hofmann's final lyrical query 'What became of you/ bright sparrow, featherhead?', laments the road taken to the office, to profit for its own sake.

The tone is often satirical or ironical, but problems of selection in the Selected Poems appear if you compare the more occasional pieces with what has been left out. That is not to say occasional is bad: in 'On the Beach at Thorpeness', from Corona, Corona (1993), the crunch of shingle stimulates a stream of thoughts overshadowed by the British military presence:

'Roaring waves of fighters headed back to Bentwaters.
The tide advanced in blunt cod's-head curves,
ebbed through the chattering teeth of the pebbles.
Jaw jaw. War war.'

Taken from Approximately Nowhere, 'Malvern Road' seems less finished. It hinges on the phrase 'do you remember', and is followed by a two-page sentence of ephemeral thoughts and images, missing its final question mark. We could have had a shorter poem like 'Is It Decided', which is still autobiographical, but its language is as packed and plangent as Michael Hamburger's Paul Celan, 'The sweet creep of green this English summer./ Trees addled by carbon monoxide'; its conclusion as revelatory as a James Wright turn: 'I'm in mourning for my life - or ours; or ours?"

These problems fade when faced with the rewards of reading the work closely. Michael Hofmann is a cold and passionate artist whose Selected Poems is unlike anything else in contemporary British and Irish poetry.

Michael Hofmann, Selected Poems (Faber, £12.99)

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.