Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     The sudden death in 1993 of his father, the German novelist Gert Hofmann, left Michael Hofmann not so much speechless as in mid-sentence. While his father had completed a new manuscript by the time of his death, the book of his life was decidedly unfinished – without a final resolution of the tense father-son aspects of the plot:

some months before, a choleric note dashed off to me
cutting me off, it would once have been said, 
for nothing I could this time see that I’d done wrong...

Death marks a fresh phase of the dialogue rather than its end, a new adjustment rather than a last judgement. As in Alastair Reid’s poem, ‘My Father, Dying’, the “hesitant conversation” now beginning is destined to go “on and on and on”.

     Michael Hofmann, born in Freiburg in 1957, is not only the son of a distinguished novelist but also a trusted translator of novelists such as Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen and Beat Sterchi (dedicatee of Hofmann’s laconic poem, ‘Pastorale’, and author of Blösch, a masterpiece regarded as the Ulysses of the dairy cow). His own powers of characterisation – themselves worthy of a novelist – have augmented his gifts for atmosphere and ambience in a striking series of portraits of Gert Hofmann: pointed rather than rounded, one-sided but certainly not one-dimensional. Biography has proved instructive too; Michael Hofmann’s third book, the transitional collection Corona, Corona (1993), opened with a series of portraits of artists not unconnected with the father-son theme. Among these potted biographies is found a painter who “slayed” his father, a father who shot his famous son, and Crassus “whose head was severed a day later than his son’s”. As if to emphasise the inescapability of the paternal motif, one of his profiled painters is called Dadd, another is a Dadaist.

     Michael Hofmann’s best work tends to be dense in style and tense in mood. The poet’s father is viewed unsparingly yet not altogether unlovingly, however muffled the emotion may be. One suspects that it was his son’s coolly detached stance, his artistic sang-froid, which caused offence to Gert Hofmann – and he was undoubtedly hurt by the poems – as much as the unrestricted access granted to his private peccadilloes: the salami breath, the snorting, the duplicity, infidelity, forced bonhomie and patriarchy. Aiming, in his own words, to be “nagging [...] or provoking”, Michael Hofmann wanted to test the nature of the response his poems could provoke from his father. As son remarked of father on the BBC television documentary in which they circled one another warily like a pair of Achilles’ heels, “If you have the power to hurt someone, I expect it means they still love you [...] and I wanted to be assured of that”. 

     In another BBC programme, Michael Hofmann laid claim to “candour” as an un-English quality he brings to poetry. His “mania for truth” (a reaction, he has suggested, to being the son of a fiction writer) makes him more concerned to understand his father than to exalt him in death. The Approximately Nowhere poems written in Gert Hofmann’s memory are as devoid of sentimentality as those which gave his second collection, Acrimony (1986), its rancorous title; and, while they may sometimes seem as “diamond hard” as the potatoes which his father “bestirred himself to grow one year”, they are the offshoots of an obsessiveness which is the opposite of indifference. Indeed, there is something of the inverted self-portrait about a number of the poems written over the years. In scrutinising his writer father’s lifestyle, and the behaviour of the other literary figures he depicts, Michael Hofmann is implicitly asking how he himself should live. Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), his stunningly assured debut, contained a poem to his father which ended:

Once there was a bureaucratic inquiry
to determine where you should be registered.
What was the centre of your life-interests?

You said your family; your family said your work.

This choice between “perfection of the life, or of the work” remains a pressing issue three collections later in Approximately Nowhere.       

     It would be grossly unfair to Hofmann – easily among the best and most adventurous poets of his generation – to represent him as a one-theme poet. On the contrary, he has from the beginning forged a poetry capable of swallowing anything it is fed, with scarcely a discernible gulp. Nights in the Iron Hotel juxtaposed spark-plugs and tampons, nuclear bunkers and cave art, a girl’s photograph and an airplane propeller. In the new book, as in its predecessors, worldly goods – the tacky, comforting and absurd – are everywhere on view: radios and Teasmaids, mattresses and condoms, “a Spanish guitar and a Dustbuster hanging together like a yellow-grey Braque”. Hofmann’s poems sometimes sweep all before them – people, places, possessions – in lists (‘Zirbelstrasse’ and ‘Litany’, for instance) which are redeemed from monotony by the intensity of the alienated memories they evoke. No one does dinginess better than Hofmann. ‘Malvern Road’, with its Lowellesque “do you remember” planted in the third line, goes on to recall the street where a couple “first set up house” together:

the corner pub we probably never set foot in,
the health centre padlocked and grilled like an offie,
the prefab post office set down at an odd angle,
the bank that closed down, the undertaker who stayed open...

     Hofmann’s openings are sudden, his endings are abrupt, his middles are deadpan and downbeat. His poems can survive without perceptible rhythms but not without pliant tones. In the absence of rhyme and metre, the energy which binds his poems together is generated from a fusion of foreign phrases, cinematic transitions, sexual tensions, volatile emotions,  elliptical observations, oblique suggestions, literary allusions, disinterested self-examinations... The weaker poems are those which, because some of the essential ingredients are missing, are too thinly-textured to rise above anecdote or whimsy. Many of the slighter pieces in Approximately Nowhere are short, in one case (‘My Life and Loves’) amounting to a single gnomic – or, at any rate, knowing – line (“Frank Harris. And a syringe for afters.”).     

     Short poems pose a particular challenge to Hofmann, who has absorbed the work of Ian Hamilton (to the extent of hoarding copies of The Visit), Bertolt Brecht (the towering genius who could cram an epic into an epigram) and Adam Zagajewski (a specialist in brief insubstantial poems). As a restless poet – showing no more inclination to settle for one stylistic mode than for a conventional, suburban middle-age – Hofmann can be expected to worry at the short poem until he has mastered it, perhaps even devised a truly contemporary equivalent of the classical epigram. The drawback with brevity is that it denies him scope for those aggregations of detail on which the success of his poems typically depends. When brevity and scathing wit blend convincingly in the shorter poems, however, they wear a winning grin, as in the irony-packed six-liner entitled ‘Ingerlund’:

The fat boy by Buddha out of Boadicea
with the pebbledash acne and half-timbered haircut,
sitting on the pavement with his boots in the gutter,

we must have made his day when we pulled over
and asked him for the site of the Iron Age fort
in his conservation village.          

     The pebbledash and half-timber are reminders of how visual Hofmann can be. Not greatly given to metaphor or simile (though accomplished when inclined: “my vast desk/ like an aircraft carrier”), he can daub words with an Expressionist palette (“a fizzy orange-purple sky”) or more subdued tints. Those who remember the “field-grey Mercedes” and the “caramel-coloured” slugs of earlier poems will relish the similarly precise brushwork of Approximately Nowhere: “liver-coloured buildings”, a “sidewalk [...] the colour of old snow”, the “ochre bodystocking pancake colour” of his father’s corpse.    

     Instead of smoothing out the foreign component of his language with a Home Counties voice-over, Hofmann brings his multi-lingualism into the English he uses. He consciously and exuberantly mixes registers, languages and idioms, letting his macaronic tongue speak for a deracinated contemporary world. His large vocabulary does not discriminate between the lingua franca of the study (“abscission”, “fauve”, “cryogenics”) and street lingo (“gimme”, “puke”, “muso”); yet he never succumbs to the New Philistinism which plays down learning for the sake of modish streetcred. Books are a fundamental part of reality for writers, even more so presumably for those who happen also to be the children of writers. It is perfectly natural, therefore, for Hofmann to invoke Kafka and Kleist, Vallejo and Montale in Approximately Nowhere, just as names like Byron, Brooke, Horváth and Chekhov had dotted his previous collections.

     ‘XXXX’, which finds the forty year-old Michael Hofmann grappling with a personal crisis, connects a feverish reading spell with a bookish childhood. And the poet is momentarily – not to mention unexpectedly – on the same wavelength as the novelist father whom, in Acrimony, he had accused of drowning out his voice (“‘Why did God give me a voice’,/ I asked, ‘if you always keep the radio on?’”):

Most of the day I’m either lying down
or asleep.  I haven’t read this many books
this avidly since I was a boy.
Nights are difficult.  Sometimes I shout.

I’m quarrelsome, charming, lustful, inconsolable, broken.
I have the radio on as much as ever my father did,
carrying it with me from room to room.
I like its level talk.