Michael Hofmann was born in Germany and moved to England in 1961. Educated at Oxford and Cambridge, he has worked as a freelance writer, translator, and critic since 1983. His most recent poetry collection One Lark, One Horse was released in 2018. Nights in the Iron Hotel, his first book of poems, appeared in 1984. He is an influential and award-winning translator of writers such as Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Herta Müller. In 2008 he was Poet in Residence in Queensland. Michael Hofmann's Selected Poems appeared with FSG and Faber. His Gottfried Benn translations, Impromptus, was released in 2013.
The American poet Robert Lowell (1917–77), I don’t suppose, intended to eclipse his contemporaries, competitors, rivals, wives, any more than in one of his poems the new esplanade along the Charles River intended to stamp down ‘grass and growth’, as he rather vaguely puts it, with ‘square stone shoes’, but it’s what he did. Now, in the almost half a century since his passing, and the ... (read more)
The joy of rhizomes.Four makes of bamboovolunteering everywhere,a kind of supergrass.‘Hello, it’s me.’A snitch as tall as a tree.Whenever I pass that way,I have at them with the hatchet.Two minutes of violent exercise.They are the isolate stiff hairson my Eczema Reversion Lawn@
where the weeds have cross-wiredthe surface and depth-charged the rootswith their little water-barrel reservoirs.I ... (read more)
We have the White Louse. His name is Donal Dump. He is the Resident, and he heads the Dump maladministration, squillionaires and a sprain-surgeon, a Cabinet of all the talons. They call him a racial spigot. He sees it as he calls it, which makes him spigot. He squitters Twitter on the shitter, and we titter after. He only squeaks for us. He is our mouth-squeeze. He has a background in constriction ... (read more)
June 22
And many happy returns of the day to Cyndi Lauper, 65,once said to ‘dress funny’ and her voice likened to ‘rat’ (or ‘rat’s’),singing the song ‘Money changes everything’, like a coarsened Bowie,and to the nameless, ageless rat featherbedded in a mysteriously malfunctioningIndian ATM machine in over a million mostly shredded rupees.
Michael Hofmann ... (read more)
I can readily see that I am not the intended reader for The Unauthorised Life of Ted Hughes. Born in the year his first book of poems came out (The Hawk in the Rain, 1957); made to read Hughes at school (I preferred Sylvia Plath); a graduate of the same university (Cambridge); my books published by the same publisher (Faber), and sharing (if at all) the same bookstore shelves (between Heaney and H ... (read more)
Stumbling round the house absent-mindedly or in the off-hours, I wonder where the economy-sized fish tank came from; or the dictionary of some unexpectedly eloquent Oceanian language; or the errant slab of copper sulphate (did some friend or enemy leave it?). Then I remember that it’s the new Australian poetry anthology I am reviewing, the thick end of 1100 large pages – is it the format calle ... (read more)
