Dictionary of Literary Biography on Michael Hofmann
When Michael Hofmann's poems began to be published in British magazines in the early 1980s, they were quickly recognized as the work of a fresh and original talent. Though Hofmann was still in his early twenties, his work did not seem in the least derivative, and from the beginning he established an unmistakable poetic voice: flat, laconic, rarely rhyming, never getting above itself, preoccupied by the minutiae of modern (largely urban) Europe but filtering its observations through literature and the cinema. He has published only one full-length collection, Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), but his future already looks bright.
Hofmann was born in 1957 in Freiburg, West Germany. His father, Gert, was a German academic and writer, and when Michael was four the family moved to Bristol, England, where his father took up a teaching post at the university. A peripatetic pattern had been set: in subsequent years Gert Hofmann took his wife, Eva, and their children (Michael and three younger sisters) to Edinburgh (1963-1965), Yale and Berkeley (1965-1967), and back to Edinburgh (1967-1971) before settling in Klagenfurt, Austria. During this period Michael was educated at James Gillespie's Boys' School in Edinburgh and then at Winchester, one of the most distinguished English public schools, where he was a boarder. In 1976 he went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, achieving a first-class honors degree in English in 1979. This was followed by a year's study in Regensburg, West Germany, and from 1980-1983 three years' postgraduate work at Cambridge under the supervision first of J.H. Prynne (also a poet) and then of Christopher Ricks (one of England's foremost critics of poetry). Hofmann began his research on Rainer Maria Rilke, later switching to Robert Lowell. The Ph.D was never completed, and in 1983 he came to work as a free-lance translator and writer in London; but the influences of Rilke and Lowell were assimilated in his poetry (he had begun writing seriously in 1977, while still an undergraduate). His own father may have been a more important general model, however: Gert Hofmann's rather Pinteresque plays have been produced in Germany and in London, and recently he had become a successful novelist and short-story writer, translated in America by Christopher Middleton and also in France, East Germany, and Scandinavia. Literature clearly runs in the family.
Michael Hofmann's poetry expresses something of the rather peripatetic life he experienced in childhood and adolescence, and something, too, of the shy and uncertain personality of a young poet. He ranges over and makes note of the clutter of the contemporary world: T-shirts, sex shops, soda water, hair-setting gel, bomb shelters, motels, acid rain, vacuum cleaners, "Beatlemania, miniskirts, glue-sniffing,/Snuff movies." His poetry shifts in setting between the Germany he originated from and the England he now lives in, traveling through Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands as well. It has a strong feeling for "dislocated" people, in particular for couples alienated from each other or from the places they live in, passing their time bemusedly "in a hotel in a foreign country/where the morals are different." A typical Hofmann setting is a border town--as in the Audenesque "Fürth i. Wald":
These strips of towns, with their troubled histories,
they are lost in the woods like Hansel and Gretel.
Counters at peace conferences, they changed hands
so often, they became indistinguishable, worthless.
Polyglot and juggled like Belgium, each of them keeps
a spare name in the other language to fall back on.
Only their wanton, spawning frontier tells them apart.
Hofmann is also fascinated by films and television. One of his most haunting poems, "Dependants," links the lonely narrator/spectator with the woman-starved inmates of a prison--the poem is based on Brute Force (1947), a film starring Burt Lancaster. Another poem, "Entropy (The Late Show)," ingeniously compares the use of the split screen by early Soviet pioneers with its use today in British television coverage of darts matches. A third poem, "Shapes of Things," carries a reference to "the rare Ava Gardner, the last woman alive/Modelling her check workshirts in On the Beach," and becomes a wry, understated contribution to the literature of nuclear war. But the influence of film goes deeper, into Hofmann's technique, with its rapid cutting between subjects and its skill at making unusual connections. Some of these connections are simple visual correspondences which remind one of the "Martian" poems of Craig Raine, Hofmann's editor at Faber and Faber: a gymnast swinging "like a hooked fish," a small child like "a gleeful crustacean executing pincer movements." Others are more complex and arresting, as in "Hausfrauenchor," where a jealous wife who has written to an "agony aunt" advice columnist complaining of her unfaithful husband is told to grant him
a general amnesty for this particular offence.
A mass-exemption, like the students of '68,
who no longer have a "past," and instead hold
positions in the Civil Service.
A similar gift for making "correspondences" is evident in a poem called "Touring Company," where a number of disparate elements--the poet's actress-girlfriend, the small coins she keeps in her room, dust, blood, and "dead human skin"--are drawn together into a conversational meditation on mortality that is funny and serious at the same time:
Yesterday, you played five small parts
in Macbeth: four cowards and a murdered child--
a friend drew a red line across your throat
with his dagger. I sat in the front row,
worrying about the psychological consequences
of being murdered every night for a month ...
And the blood seeped into our private life;
that of the stars was washable, but yours was
permanent for economy. It pales on my sheets,
souvenir of your lovely blush ... When you left,
you forgot your vanishing-cream--my biker,
spark-plugs mixing with tampons in your handbag!
Some reviewers of Hofmann's Nights in the Iron Hotel called it a whimsical and even cynical book, complained that much of it was simply a retailing of anecdotes, or thought it too flat and sociological. But all these comments suggest an insensitivity to Hofmann's tone of voice. He is at bottom a vulnerable and at times rather naive lyric poet, and it is appropriate that his book should end with a love poem, the speaker and his lover waking "late, naked, stuck to each other," an image which connects with the closing description of hedgehogs, which "must help each other to pull off the leaves/that covered them while they were hibernating." With his lyric gifts, his attentiveness to the quotidian or workaday world, and his quiet underlying concern with larger themes (the most recurrent image in Nights in the Iron Hotel is that of dust), Michael Hofmann could justifiably be said to be the outstanding British poet under thirty.
This is the complete article, containing 1,088 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
