Probably Daniel Hoffman writes as well as any poet in America today, but The Center of Attention … won't extend his reputation and it suffers from the same problems as its predecessor, Broken Laws. Hoffman is among those poets born in the 1920s (Wilbur, Simpson, Rich, and Dickey come to mind among others) who began as formalists and have gradually loosened their stanzas and rhythms to accommodate a wider range of experience and feeling than was possible in the autotelic structures they began with. What Hoffman lacks, however, is precisely what the title of the volume professes, a focus for his perception which can transcend the poem as exercise-on-a-topic (see both parts II and III for this tendency). The poems in Part I are strong, austere, varied in form and subject, and concerned with the dichotomy of private and public life: death is at the center of their vision...