Approximately Nowhere by Michael Hofmann (Faber & Faber) Price: £7.99

 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 no connection whatever with the Hudson, so this is a surreal juxtaposition, perhaps hinting at sexual deviancy on the Hudson, or even slave trading. Therefore, we eventually recognise this as a poem, not a pop song, a limerick, a jingle or a ballad. The actual text of the poem is quite separate and separable from the title, it might as well have been Baudelaire on the Mississipi, for by this reasoning: Venerable French poet +trendy Americana+dubious neologisms+child abusers=a poem And unfortunately, for everyone except the most pre-pubescent sixth formers, this is not the case, and this has more connection to nonsense than modernity, or to the thing that it hints that it is, ie a poem. Much of the rest of this collection has a similar feel to it, although there is some excellent writing as well, gems among the mud: A magenta giant like my father, Or again Gerstl, the other hope (after Kokoschka who lived forever) Of Austrian painting, Dead at maybe twenty-five, his head an orange Spiked on the clove of his neck, More shocking than Van Gogh, Sun flecks of paint, A silent bray of disseverance. (Fou Rire) But the writer would be better off trying to convince us of his competancy as a writer, than attempting to impress with this shower of pseudo-academic flummery. There are some reasonable elegies for the writer’s father, an eminent novelist in Germany, poems about an adulterous love affair, and about that most drole of all places Essex, an elephant’s graveyard if ever there was one, it seems: They turned your pet field into a country club, And the cemetery was grey with rabbits And the graves of your friends Who had died young of boredom. (Essex) Finally, Hofmann’s poetry offers possibilities that might gain fruition by a gradual emptying of the academia and spuriousness that surrounds his work, the collection is worth reading, and does reward re-reading. To: Kevin Bailey 3 Ardgreenan Drive, The Haiku Quarterly Belfast BT4 3FQ, 39 Exmouth Street N.Ireland Wiltshire, SN1 3PU England 15/09/96 Dear Kevin, Thanks for your letter and the book to review. I have been submitting to the English journals for several years now, after publishing a pamphlet of twenty poems with a small Belfast publishing outfit called Lapwing. I am very interested in finding a niche of my own in the publishing world so I have sent material to University of Salzburg. When I started out as a writer I think I was very naive about the difficulty of becoming established, and just thought I'd be scooped up by Faber & Faber: such are the foibles of youth. But, I'm always interested in finding out more about poetry and in discussing it with other writers, so it would be interesting to network with some of HQ's writers. I am particularly interested in finding out more about form: I started off writing metrically, or trying to write metrically, and occasionally used rhyme, but got fed up with it, because it seems an artificial constraint on meaning, and because it just seems so dated.. I do worry about this, perhaps as a form of ontological insecurity, I do get the occasional rejection slip saying 'don't write any more poetry, it neither scans nor is it very sincere or emotional, you're real talent is as an essayist'. I think that free verse has to have ordering principles as well, and that it can't just be 'free': for instance in PARTING, the triplet 'Suitcase, bed, light' introduced a schema of some kind, or in other poems where I've tried to play upon placenames and their associations, not caring particularly whether a line has an even number of syllables or not (except in the Haiku which I sent you). Perhaps there could be more debate in the columns of HQ on this matter! What are your own predilections, for instance? Perhaps you could set aside some space for letters in HQ, a space for debate to take place on matters of form, for instance. In any case, I hope that you enjoy the review, which I have limited to 250 words, given the constraints of space in HQ, Bests Ps DRAKE INTERNATIONAL SERVICES, Market House, Market Place, Deddington, Oxford OX15 0SF, want a copy of the review sent to them, if and when it is published. 

NECESSARY CLUES: A REVIEW OF BRENDAN MCMAHON'S ENEMY LINES 

In Brendan McMahon's Enemy Lines a terse and imagistic verse style is mediatated with insights and internalisations about language which adumbrate his role in real life as a psychotherapist. Perhaps the Freudian technique of the 'talking cure' is being taken to its limit by the poet as a means of divulging the inner workings of his poetic method and of the analysts mediation with the analysand. While the technique can be edifying and revealing, we are sometimes lost in a concatenation of images, as if the poet no longer felt it necessary to give the reader any necessary clues: For each dying sun, a narrative redemption; Pleiades swarm to golden bees, dwarf parrots, the boys and girls of heaven are dancing. The Southern Cross, a four-eyed jaguar, The emu's track an ashy path, such is the mind's quick twist, while dead souls pass, so slow. (Stars) At its worst McMahon's poetry can offer an intricate confusion and concatenation of images, but at its best we are at least made to work with the poems. As in poems like Chaffeur, McMahon adumbrates the relationship between Yeats and Maud Gonne, 'I read him once the 'Rose/upon the Rood of Time'. He liked/the poem, said she was nothing special.' McMahon has the ability to cooly juggle with language, to imply a world of meaning from a sentence, but is too easily led into absences and cul de sacs: 'The heart has lost velocity,/is turning into bone./a bucket full of echoes/of death's black telephone.' (Endgame) Perhaps this indicates a lack of editorial tightness, for some of McMahon's material fails to integrate with his central theme, the numinous in everyday life. His free verse style is rarely prosaic, but sometimes his material seems to be eerily disconnected from time and place, as if this volume was intended as a attempt at a theoretical location. He cites Seamus Heaney in his opening prologue: Much of the best verse in recent decades has been an attempt, in Seamus Heaney's words 'to create a country of the mind that is related to a passing way of life'. But rarely does McMahon offer us such integration of style and subject matter, the reader is left clutching at possibilities that rarely coalesce. McMahon's connections with Ireland and his attempt to come to terms with his early seperation from his homeland would indicate a way of summing up this volume, but instead a cosmopolitan worldview is inserted, and abrogates the meanings that McMahon has tried to make. However, Enemy Lines is certainly an interesting volume of poetry, and does reward re-reading. 

STEPPING GENTLY by Joan Maizels 48pp, £5.50, Bumblebee Press, 88 Morningside Drive, Edinburgh, EH10 5NT, Scotland, UK. Joan Maizel’s poems are pithy and epigrammatic, in some ways satisfying, but never perhaps linguistically innovative, sometimes alluding to the literate, and the hackneyed. Technically she uses predominantly free verse forms, lines of uneven length, without regular syllabic pattern, but sometimes rhyming. Perhaps a poem like The Man in the Ice is most significantly allusive, possibly to Seamus Heaney’s Bogmen poems. More attention to verse structure, with many lines ending on feminine, or weak syllables, might differentiate her work from its ‘prose’ origins. Her best work is observant of the everyday work of women and scenes of domesticity, as in Re-cycling: I watch my mother Comb her hair Unravel, twist Loose strands Roll them between Finger and thumb…. More work is required for the poet to ultimately ‘make it new’ and to constantly question the nature of experience and language, more original perception of the everyday world and its linkage to the wider issues of the feminine and language. However, many of the poems are curiously satisfying, mature in theme and language (the writer is an octogenarian) with a Mozartian delicacy and minimalistic grace.