The Engine

 Approximately Nowhere by Michael Hofmann (Faber & Faber) Price: £7.99  Michael Hofmann’s collection Approximately Nowhere is subversive and simultaneously conformist in its attempt to describe or enscribe modernity. A typical poem mentions the venerable and antique, and contrastingly modern vocabulary and imagery: Some kill somewhere upstate. Bud light A gutted mill, three storeys of brickwork, Mattresses and condoms, elder and sumac, Child abusers fishing for chub in heavy water.                                                             (Rimbaud on the Hudson)  My initial question was, why Rimbaud? And why, particularly the Hudson, which connotes Hudson Bay or the Hudson River? Rimbaud is a venerable French poet, with a risque reputation, his homosexuality and eventual career as a slave trader; but his name, in itself, denotes this as a poem, since Rimbaud is unmistakeably a poet, and a famous one to boot, we cannot but realise the inherent poeticism of this poem. Rimbaud had n