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Two Poems

Michael Hofmann, 2 July 1981

... Museum Piece The room smells of semen. The leather curtain that hangs in the doorway to keep the men from the boys is now flapping like a ventilator ... People crowd in to see the erotic drawings. Yonis in close-up like a row of fingerprints. – Hokusai’s hairfine precipice technique applied to pubic hair. Fingers do the walking, tiny feet wave in mid-air ...

Three Poems

Michael Hofmann, 5 May 1988

... Biology The brick ship of Victorian science steamed on, ivy beard, iron beams and stairs, iron paddleboat pillars. A pair of whiskery Germans, father and son, had specialised in fixing in glass some of the degenerative conditions of fruit. A split blue peach, a bough laden with gangrene – all pocked, opaque, Venetian, venereal ... Dry air, manila light, cardboard and silence, anything to stave off the time when the exhibits will revert to silica, parrot feathers and wire ...

Two Poems

Michael Hofmann, 17 November 1983

... Campaign Fever We woke drugged and naked. Did our flowers rob us and beat us over the head while we were asleep? They were competing for the same air as us – the thick, vegetable breath of under the eaves. It seems like several days ago that I went to see you to your train. A cuckoo called and our vision drizzled, though the air was dry. In a place I’d never noticed before, a low siren was sounding alternate notes ...

From Kensal Rise to Heaven

Michael Hofmann, 17 May 1984

... Old Labour slogans, Venceremos, dates for demonstrations like passed deadlines – they must be disappointed to find they still exist. Half-way down the street, a sign struggles to its feet and says Brent. The surfaces are friable, broken and dirty, a skin unsuitable for chemical treatment. Building, repair and demolition go on simultaneously, indistinguishably ...

Forgetfulness

Michael Hofmann, 18 February 2016

... for Fred ‘Empiricism’ has been gone far more often than not; I think I originally learned it in my teens. Now I sometimes find it by alphabetising, but most of the time it’s gone and stays gone. I don’t know if I dislike it because I can’t remember it, or I can’t remember it because I dislike it. It’s as though it’s on permanent loan somewhere ...

Two Poems

Michael Hofmann, 6 July 1989

... Ocosingo The crazy zocalo tips at a loco angle. It pours three hundred infant girls, dressed like Christmas tree fairies, down the church’s throat, singing. A thin trickle of demonstrators chant ‘Mexico!’ uphill. Whitewashed against white ants, the yew tree trunks look spindly and phosphorescent, like stalagmites in the cavern of their shade. The birds won’t sing ...

Three Poems

Michael Hofmann, 22 June 1995

... An Education For James, again At the old Tramontana on Tottenham Court Road among the hi-fi shops I learned to order what you ordered, not studenty noodles but sophisticated things like the special. After years of our playing at lunch the faithful waiter shook himself to death with Parkinson’s practically before our eyes. (I remember the rattle and slop of one last saucerful of coffee ...

Scylla

Michael Hofmann, 20 October 1994

... after Metamorphoses, Book VIII I knew about Helen, they kept selling me Helen, but I never even got to be stolen in the first place. Sieges are boring – did you know. Everything’s fine, just each day’s a little bit worse than the last. And you start thinking how long it is since you saw prawns or a nice pair of earrings or a magazine. I had my townhouse, but I practically lived on the battlements, they even let me use the telescope during the lulls ...

Three Poems

Michael Hofmann, 4 August 1983

... My Father at Fifty Your mysterious economy blows the buttons off your shirts, and permits overdrafts at several foreign banks. – It must cost the earth. Once I thought of you virtually as a savage, atavistic, well-aligned, without frailties. A man of strong appetites, governed by instinct. You never cleaned your teeth, but they were perfect anyway from a diet of undercooked meat; you gnawed the bones; anything sweet you considered frivolous ...

Kleist in Paris

Michael Hofmann, 16 September 1982

... Dearest Mina,       Thank you for yours, my first news of you in ten weeks. Imagine my happiness when I saw my address in your handwriting. But then the postmaster wanted to see my passport, and I didn’t have it on me. I begged him to make an exception, swore that I was Kleist, but it was in vain. Deceived a thousand times, he couldn’t believe there was an honest man left in Paris ...

Seven Poems

Michael Hofmann, 4 September 1980

... Phase I live in Berkeleyan hostility With my parents. The fridge bellows Like a young tractor. Very soon I shall Run away and join the Vatican Guard. Back Numbers Carelessly we tore our love Like soft newspapers with feet. Then stooping down, we read With interest some vintage items. Carnal Poem Birds came and pecked at a group of yellow bread crusts scattered on a low roof ...

Not in Spanish

Michael Hofmann: Bilingualism, 21 May 2020

... This​ is the first and only book on bilingualism I have read, but before coming to that there are two other things worthy of mention.* The first is the author’s biographical note. Albert Costa, a research professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona who specialised in neurocognition and language processing, died in 2018, at the age of 48. The second is the single modest line on the copyright page, where no one looks, crediting the translation to John W ...

Alphabetophile

Michael Hofmann: Eley Williams, 7 September 2017

Attrib. and Other Stories 
by Eley Williams.
Influx, 169 pp., £9.99, March 2017, 978 1 910312 16 2
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Frit 
by Eley Williams.
Sad, 35 pp., £6, April 2017
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... Before​ I embarked on Eley Williams, of whom I had read nothing and knew nothing, I flipped through Attrib., her first book of stories. Even on first flip, I got a sense of something I sometimes find in things I like and that seem good to me, something that subliminally distinguishes writing that is careful and alive: a kind of alphabetical justice, to give this sheepish and probably disreputable thing a name in public ...

At the Louisiana

Michael Hofmann: On Chaïm Soutine, 24 October 2024

... This​ Louisiana was not bought off a skint, warmongering Napoleon for a measly $15 million, but is one of the most beautiful galleries of modern art anywhere. It was founded in 1958 in a dazzlingly extended and updated villa on the Zealand coast, an hour north of Copenhagen, and named for the first owner’s three (presumably consecutive) wives, all of whom were called Louise ...

On Lawrence Joseph

Michael Hofmann, 19 March 2020

... If​ it answers to now, if it’s sufficiently fearless and adaptable and capacious, why not write the same poem again and again – in couplets, in slabs, in measured stanzas, in irregular numbered parts, in plump quatrains? Why not saturate the thing with fact, with horror, with beauty, with violence, with throwaway colloquial titles, with smeary cut-up technique? With the poem mirroring a fast walk (in New York City) or a slow drive (in Detroit); a short lyric documentary film with snatches of Motown and inner voiceover; a dustbin full of bundled-up news we’d rather forget, or something even more abstract and uncontrollable (a facility, a medium, a pulse); and the poet a vagrant, a collector, a compulsive notetaker, a Cassandra, a Louis MacNeice for the 21st century?This, I believe, is the case with Lawrence Joseph, whose A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems, is out this month (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 ...

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