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Martyn Crucefix explores three poets’ long-term development

Guy Goffette
edited and translated by Marilyn Hacker
Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems
University of Chicago Press £15

Michael Hofmann
Selected Poems
Faber & Faber £12.99

Peter Robinson
The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001–2006
Shearsman £9.95

The longer-term coherence and success of a poet’s work is not – ought not to be – something willed. Like the oyster with its grain of sand, there is surely always something fortuitous about it. Marilyn Hacker’s fine translations from the French of Guy Goffette’s work suggest that, in this instance, Rimbaud’s declaration that ‘On ne part pas’ (‘You never leave’) has proved a spectacularly productive starting point. Rimbaud suggests a restlessness and desire for the other, along with the tragic recognition of human limits and the idea that imaginative travel is more real than any physical tourism. These are the topics and tensions that weave through Charlestown Blues.

   Hacker’s introduction casts Goffette in contrast to the Anglo-American preconception of contemporary French poets and not only due to his interest in form. She suggests we see modern French poetry as ‘abstract, more concerned with concepts than with human experience ... resolutely “difficult”’. Goffette’s work is diffused with ‘humor, longing, tenderness, nostalgia and occasional cruelty’ and, though Hacker over-states his likeness to James Wright and Seamus Heaney, the general thrust of her argument is right. Born in 1947, of the same generation as our Motion, Morrison and Raine, Goffette grew up on the shifting French / Belgian border (travelling without moving?). He now lives in Paris but still tends to look to the provinces and the metropolis is more often ‘a place from which his speaker is perpetually ready to depart’ (Hacker’s introduction).

   The title sequence, using the decasyllabic dixain and written during a residence in Rimbaud’s Charleville, seems scatter-shot and observational but with a strong thread of eroticism shot through it: ‘your drying / stockings and scanties of a nun at bay – / poisonous flowers for a lonely man’. Sex is one form of ‘leaving’ and Goffette catches such longing vividly: ‘oh beautiful stranger, / that creature who’s so often on the move’. Goffette’s work certainly revels in such demotic pleasures and Rimbaud himself appears shouting ‘Fuck off! to puttering poetry’ and earlier wrings ‘the neck of the azure, which always puts / too much honey on the tails of verse-worms’. In the context of French poetry, it is this combative stance that leads Goffette towards the more grounded – even sordid – presentations of life that Hacker argues make him more attractive to readers of English and American poetry.

   Goffette’s natural reach seems to approximate to the sonnet and these are frequently arranged in sequences, such as in ‘Waiting’. Largely from the point of view of a woman addressing her lover, these pieces suggest that it is the ultimate ‘leaving’ of death as well as desire that fuels his poetry. Eroticism is here more explicitly a stay against death and time – ‘the judgment of this absence crushing me // like an insect on the pane’ – though the final poem ventures a kind of romantic nostalgia, suggesting that even sex must fall short of human longing. The woman is made to envisage an island ‘where the surprise / of being lasts ... the heart is still / in place, captain of the old ship’. This paradisal view is left to stand in stark contrast to the lovers’ reality, undressing each other ‘amidst time’s peelings’.

   So Goffette’s themes are the classical ones of love, time, death; and though his diction is familiar enough with the contemporary, much of his imagery has a timelessness in its reference to journeys, rivers, trees, rooms, seashore, roads, stars. ‘Boarding the Streetcar: Variations’ responds to a photograph of New York in 1900 in which a woman climbs onto a streetcar watched intently by a male passenger and a (male) conductor. In a miracle of economy, the passenger’s viewpoint is sketched in and within six lines the moment of voyeuristic pleasure has come to represent ‘everything’:

the swift brightness of minnows
in a current, the taste of the first

fruit swiped from a market-stall, and how
the hazel switch whistled in the air

when it was about to strike a child’s
back ...

Yet when the passenger comes to try to articulate this moment he can manage ‘nothing’ or the best he can achieve are ‘words // like paper littering the grass after a fair / when shadows as they lengthen chill our hearts’. In contrast, the conductor’s view of the incident suggests that its mix of beauty and danger, its very ordinariness, provides him with some memory which makes ‘the blood of things beat lengthily like a heart / in the shadow of dead rooms’.

   Hacker’s selection covers ten years from 1991 and concludes with a longer sequence published in 2001. ‘The Raising of Icarus’ is based on the same Breughel painting that inspired Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’. Constructed from sonnet-like pieces once more, Goffette does not dwell long on the painting itself and instead seems to be observing people in the Paris metro, ‘running // against each other, same face same / night, and each one was night for every other’. Rimbaud’s phrase is again apposite; these commuters travel without arriving anywhere and yet ‘To embark and not return is what they wanted’. Later, they turn on the Shepherd in the painting who – they enviously feel – leads an idyllic pastoral life, while they must be ‘winning gold ... cheers ... bread’. It may be that the Shepherd is an artist figure but his perspective is that his life is no different to the crowd, though the one thing he does seem to know is that death and the final dissolution of things is what serves to ‘raise every object up from darkness’. This is challenging and wonderful contemporary poetry and – though the parallel text faces each page – I seldom found myself checking the original, which suggests that Hacker has done a magnificent and valuable job bringing Goffette’s work into English.

In 1983, Nights in the Iron Hotel really did announce the arrival – as the blurbs too often say – of a new voice. Michael Hofmann’s European range of reference, his bilingualism and the unmistakable but thoroughly absorbed influence of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) made him unique. From this distance, and with the publication of this twenty-five year retrospective, Hofmann’s talent still appears truly remarkable, though recent years have seen a dip in his poetic output. Although he continues to build a lengthy list of acclaimed translations, there are just seven new poems here since his last collection in 1999.

   Hofmann’s Selected Poems is arranged chronologically and the influence of Lowell’s poems like ‘Man and Wife’ and ‘Terminal Days at Beverly Farm’ is evident early on and never really disappears. The poems accumulate detail with a cool, even cruel, tone of rationality, employing longish lines and list-like forms that miraculously skirt prose largely due to their driving impetus and the layering of acute observations. Hofmann, like his role model, never displays any embarrassment in the flaunting of erudition and the allusiveness of his work is integral to it, even down to the frequent use of similes based on authorial names, where experiences are simply like Camus, Tolstoy, Chekhov. Emotionally remote, alienated and hesitant (ellipses becoming close to a tic), he is without doubt one of the roots of the much-caricatured style of masculine, clever, rather self-regarding Faber poet. But Hofmann has always been far more troubled; and in his anatomizing of society, family and relationships, he has never shirked from dealing out the same treatment to himself.

   The early ‘Family Holidays’ encapsulates his startling portrayal of family: with his novelist father’s ironically noted ‘fecundity’ at the typewriter, his mother staggering about ‘like a nude / in her sun-hat, high heels’ and his ‘doughy’ sisters turning over religiously in the sun, though ‘they were never done’. The downright viciousness of the poem is alleviated and ironised only in the last phrases where the narrator swims away each day only to ‘miserably, [crawl] back to safety’. With that final word, there seems to be a recognition of his place in the bosom of this dysfunctional group, being unhappy (as Tolstoy suggested) in their own way. Even beyond family ties, in the title poem of the first book, ‘Nights in the Iron Hotel’, the romantic idyll of Palm Beach is no more than a bitterly ironic effect of the ‘straw matting’ on the wall of a Prague hotel and the relationship itself is little more than an ‘inability to function’, an imprisonment captured by the TV image of a ‘gymnast swing[ing] like a hooked fish’. This poem also illustrates the often brilliantly contemporary leaps of Hofmann’s figurative language in its comparison of sex to ‘a luxury, / an export of healthy physical economies’.

   Hofmann regards his second collection, Acrimony, as his best and it surely is one of the great books of English poetry of the last decades of the twentieth century – harsh, wilfully contemporary, satirical and self-critical – in part a reaction to the glittering Eighties culture and its brutalist politics. Hofmann’s style of reportage really takes off in poems that bring back the period like ‘From Kensal Rise to Heaven’ which is a rattling box of objects, scenes, slogans and observed attitudes from the period’s seedier side. If one characteristic of a powerful poetic voice is the sheer variety of life it can encompass – or bring newly within the poetic range – then Hofmann’s here is magnificent. Any poet who can call up National Front election broadcasts, Denis Thatcher, the miseries of British Rail and Middle England’s ‘onetime marginals’ – Peterborough, Leicester, Birmingham – in one poem (‘Campaign Fever’) thoroughly deserves our gratitude and admiration.

   But it is his father, Gert Hofmann, who preoccupies the second half of Acrimony. Equalling, then exceeding the critical tone of Lowell, Hofmann’s cool dissection of his father is fascinating and not a little horrifying. Of course, Lowell’s work is no mere confessional since his father and his family’s position enable the poems to address the superficiality and incompetence of much of the US ruling elite in the 1950s. I’m not so convinced the same transformation occurs with Hofmann’s family poems and this has something to do with his father’s lack of public position; all too like his son, he was an aspiring and then successful author. So there is a confessional constriction to these poems though by no means does this reduce their power as character studies of a fraught, uncommunicative, rivalrous father-son relationship:

I ask myself what sort of consummation is available?
Fight; talk literature and politics; get drunk together?

Kiss him goodnight, as though half my life had never happened?

                                                             (‘Author, Author’)

   Since Acrimony, Hofmann’s work has appeared all too
slowly. In 2005 he commented: ‘There doesn’t seem to me much wrong with what I have written, but at the same time I don’t want to write any more of it; I’m looking – or waiting – for some kind of new orientation’. One constant has been Hofmann’s continuing position as student and latterly as teacher in what he refers to as ‘education, higher and higher education’ (‘Disturbances’). The apparently naked confessionalism of much of the work lends a slightly depressing aspect to the final forty pages of this Selected Poems. Hofmann has recently been reproducing effects he perfected years ago and (partly with the death of his father in 1993) it is hard to dismiss the sense of a major talent casting around for a new role, a new subject. It may be that with the years the vitriol has run low; it may be that Hofmann’s travels have left him with no locale; it may be that a more forgiving maturity has yet to find an appropriate poetic voice. It is a painful, even tragic, irony that – coming from and remaining in a diametrically opposed position – Hofmann’s latter career has begun to evoke no other English poet more powerfully than Larkin declaring that poetry had given him up.

In stark contrast, Peter Robinson, besides translations and critical books, has produced thirteen collections of poetry since 1980. The most recent, The Look of Goodbye, spans 2001 to 2006 and weighs in at 132 pages plus notes. Robinson has spent eighteen years teaching in Japan and many of the poems deal with his return to the UK and university teaching. The work is well travelled and Robinson turns his gaze to a wide variety of topics, contemporary and traditional, but an over-riding concern seems to be the idea of home. ‘The Red Dusk’ recalls the poet’s upbringing in Liverpool and that city’s obsession with football: ‘a city where you simply had to know / who’d done what on any given Saturday’. The poem plays lively variations on the colour red till the whole city appears ‘a vast inflamed eye’.

   More typically, Robinson’s poems open in observation and move seamlessly but rapidly to a contemplative style of lyric, scattered with irregular rhymes. The pondering runs some risk of becoming a bit ponderous and the very consistency of the narrative voice tends to flatten out differences between poems, few of which leap irrationally or appear driven by the need to communicate any powerful access of emotion. For example, ‘Frost Shadows’ is a short sequence about a death. Clues in the poem don’t clarify whose, but it seems someone more prone to ‘rage’ and ‘shouting fits’ rather than someone easy to love. The final section’s plain-speaking honesty is oddly lyrical in its image of the body in the casket ‘unmoved’:

                               the only one
amid our melting floods,
our fatal lack of appropriate words,
who hadn’t had to suffer your funeral.
There, there, now I’ve said it all.

The ice / tears ambiguity of ‘melting floods’, the odd pun on ‘fatal’, the rhyming couplet and repetition in the final line for me served to distance the emotional response and Robinson’s frequent reaching for word play is something to which readers will have differing reactions. Another poem, ‘Naturally Enough’, is largely descriptive of a rainstorm, though the natural event is also used as a figure of war. The poem plays on the meaning of the word ‘repair’ three times and this makes it seem a little too pleased with itself, once more distancing the reader’s engagement with what are genuinely serious concerns.

   Elsewhere, description is allowed to take a more generous centre stage – even in ‘Kyoto Protocols’ which evidently has important environmental issues in mind. Another short sequence, this leans natural description against more urban observation to great effect, managing to express the poet’s anger and disappointment at the failure of the US to sign up to the 2005 agreement, not through rumination this time but through vivid and truly memorable observation:

                 elsewhere, the hand that didn’t sign the paper
waved through leaves at the Golden Pavilion
catching a glimpse of this city through its heat-haze,
unusually warm in those mid-November days,
autumnal decay and fall deepening.