Selected Poems

Description

Michael Hofmann's poems have been widely admired, notably for their gift of compressed and vividly pointed reportage, and the collision course of words and dictions that his poetry characteristically provokes. His subject-matter has been equally individual, including his remarkable and complex series of 'father-poems', his subtle portraiture of the lives of others, East and West, together with his acerbic impressionism of contemporary England, and his exploration of Adorno's injunction that 'it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.'

Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, Germany in 1957, and came to England in 1961. He has won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey faber memorial prize for his poetry. He co-edited After Ovid with James Lasdun, and has published numerous prize-winning translations from the German, including works by Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Patrick Suskind, Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard and Durs Grunbein. In 2005, he edited the Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems. He teaches for part of the year at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

"'Michael Hofmann is one of the best poets writing in English.' Helen Dunmore, The Observer"