{"id":2123,"date":"2019-03-20T21:37:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-20T21:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2123"},"modified":"2019-03-22T17:14:24","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T17:14:24","slug":"michael-hofmann-one-lark-one-horse-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2123","title":{"rendered":"Michael Hofmann, One Lark, One Horse – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

One Lark, One Horse<\/em> by Michael Hofmann. \u00a314.99 (hardback). Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571342297<\/p>\n

Immediate attractions of One Lark, One Horse<\/em> are the poet\u2019s sharp intelligence, spectacularly fine lexical sense and mordant wit, as in the opening of \u201cCricket\u201d:<\/p>\n

Another one of those Pyrrhic experiences. Call it
\nan expyrrh<\/em>ience. A day at Lords, mostly rain,
\none of those long-drawn-out draws so perplexing to Americans.<\/p>\n

Creating the illusion of headlong, spontaneous speech, Hofmann\u2019s assured control of rhythm and syntax makes puns, images and ideas seem to ignite almost incidentally. The tone keeps changing, and different perspectives play into and out of each other, but it\u2019s all held together by the sense of a single mind running through a swerving arc of thought as it responds to the weirdness of the English attachment to cricket. At one extreme it speaks of the English as if from the viewpoint of a foreign anthropologist, drily exaggerating established stereotypes \u2013<\/p>\n

Did I say it was raining, and the forecast was for more rain?<\/p>\n

Riveting. A way, at best, for the English
\nto read their newspapers out of doors and get vaguely shirty
\nor hot under the collar about something. The paper, maybe, or the rain.<\/p>\n

However, things turn at the midpoint of the poem \u2013 \u201cAnd yet there was some residual sense of good fortune to be there\u201d \u2013 after which the speaker clearly identifies himself as one of the tiny English crowd , sharing their reactions even as he views them with quizzical detachment. That\u2019s a return to the perspective of the beginning, where he speaks of Americans from an English point of view (the pun on \u201cexpyrrh<\/em>ience\u201d assumes an English voice imitating an American accent). What makes the mind of the poem so interesting, in other words, is not just its speed and intelligence but its ability to see both other things and itself from rapidly changing angles.<\/p>\n

This ability is connected to the facts of Hofmann\u2019s life, which have made him almost but not quite at home in different cultures. Born in Germany, the son of a famous German novelist, he moved to England at four and was educated here through school and university but \u2013 I think I read somewhere \u2013 continued to speak German at home. He has spent his adult life as a prolific translator from German, and much of it teaching in American universities. And there\u2019s something deeper too. In a Paris Review interview in 2014 he said,<\/p>\n

If Kafka hadn\u2019t said it, then I would say it\u2014\u201cliterature, from which, or out of which I am composed.\u201d Perhaps I\u2019ll say it anyway, echoing Kafka. When my father\u2019s first book appeared, I was twenty-one or so. I called it his firstborn, in a poem written not long after. We defer to print, where I\u2019m from. Quite soon, I\u2019ll be like that Archimboldo painting, all book.<\/p>\n

He straddles cultures, in other words, not only in space but also in time. We all do to some extent, but someone so profoundly bookish does so to an unusual degree.<\/p>\n

Being an almost insider who\u2019s also an almost outsider gives a peculiar double penetrativeness and also dividedness to Hofmann\u2019s cultural gaze. In \u201cCricket\u201d and many other poems the result is a combination of forcefulness and uncertainty which I find deeply attractive. My favourite poems in the book are those in which Hofmann seems bewildered not only by something outside himself but also by his own responses to it.<\/p>\n

Not everyone will feel the same. Some greatly admire satirical poems such as \u201cPortrait d\u2019une Femme\u201d, which is about the shallowness of celebrity media culture. This makes a splendid display of Hofmann\u2019s rhetorical weaponry. To my mind, though, it views its subject too purely from outside, pitting pop culture against the high culture of Ezra Pound. The title copies that of Pound\u2019s portrait of a society hostess who has no self beyond bits and pieces she\u2019s picked up from others \u2013 \u201cYour mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,\u201d as Pound puts it. Hofmann\u2019s epigraph is a quotation from Pound\u2019s \u201cHugh Selwyn Mauberley\u201d \u2013 \u201cThe age demanded an image \/ of its accelerated grimace\u201d. As in Pound\u2019s \u201cPortrait\u201d, Hofmann\u2019s title is ironic: his target has no imaginary presence beyond the media forces she channels. That\u2019s the point, you might say, but as in Pound\u2019s poem I think it limits our engagement. The writer\u2019s gifts are vividly displayed in a flood of biting characterisations and clacking, clattering or hissing syllables, but in the end it\u2019s all too single-minded not to become boring before the foam has finished running up the beach.<\/p>\n

What a contrast with \u201cValais\u201d, about the canton in Switzerland where Rilke finished the Duino Elegies<\/em>. Where satirical poems like \u201cPortrait\u201d or \u201cVenice Beach\u201d seem to speak from a position\u00a0 of scornful superiority \u201cValais\u201d speaks out of and draws the reader into a volatile contemplation of blending, disruption and change. Instead of pushing one line of thought through, as the satirical poems do, it creates a fluid mosaic of statements in which each releases ripples of suggestion and all enter into multiple relationships with each other. It sets you thinking and imagining for yourself, rather than just receiving the poet\u2019s attitude. Take the stanza<\/p>\n

Smells of hay and dung, the murmurs of subtle conversation.
\nNext door are tax-efficient sheep.
\nThe underground chicken palace like CERN
\nOr a discreet gun emplacement.
\nThe lights come on when we appear and go off after we\u2019re gone.<\/p>\n

The satirical potential of the second and third of those lines is obvious, and in a lesser poem might have been systematically developed. Here, their acerbity is just one element in a swirl of responses and reflections. For one thing, irony is offset by the pastoral peace of the first line. For another, across the second line there flashes the delightfully absurd idea of the sheep as neighbours in the human sense, good at compiling their own tax returns. For another, the peacefulness of the first three lines contrasts with what\u2019s earlier been said about the violent history of a crossing point that was once the site of threatening castles and the route of Hannibal\u2019s and Napoleon\u2019s armies . Better unromantic calculations of tax advantages than armies in transit or predatory feudal lords keeping an eye on trade routes, even if the fourth line does hint that preparedness for war still underlies our peace. I\u2019m not sure what the chicken palace is \u2013 I picture a glittering, nightmarish battery farm in which chickens become not much more than biomachines tended by white gowned workers \u2013 but its associative collision with CERN sets off trains of thought about the positive and negative aspects of the scientific approach to life… The hadron collider itself is a dramatically extreme symbol of the processes of interaction and change previously suggested by the image of the Rhone as a conduit of trade, by the line about \u201cthe island exporting itself<\/em> to its neighbours one barge at a time\u201d and by the beautifully paradoxical description of the valley as \u201ca place<\/em> of through<\/em>\u201d (my italics). Such processes, in other words, relate to fundamentals of existence.<\/p>\n

I could go on. In this poem of endlessly changing shimmers of suggestion you can\u2019t start disentangling threads without feeling the absurdity of stopping at any particular point. There are many other suggestions in the stanza I\u2019ve just discussed, let alone in the poem as a whole. As far as the rest of the poem is concerned, I\u2019ll just make two more observations.<\/p>\n

First, Hofmann\u2019s wordplay is present in a more subdued manner than in \u201cCricket\u201d, but no less effectively for that. \u201cPoplars were planted en passant<\/em> by Napoleon\u2019s Grande Arm\u00e9e<\/em>\u201d is magical in the way one phrase both contains and dissolves the earth-shaking literal passage of the army: as they passed through<\/em> they incidentally<\/em> planted the poplars. In a sense Hofmann could have effected the same play on words by writing \u201cin passing\u201d or \u201cby the way\u201d, but because in English \u201cen passant\u201d refers to a chess move or is an elegant way of saying \u201cincidentally\u201d, suggesting a fleeting change of direction in what someone says<\/em>, it transforms violence into peace far more radically.<\/p>\n

Second, this poem shares concerns of the volume that I haven\u2019t focused on: poems that seem to reflect, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, on Hofmann\u2019s own life and aging, and to take stock of his achievements. Some are extremely brief, but there\u2019s a special poignancy to this group. \u201cValais\u201d is both light and subtly poised in the way it touches on the theme. All its images seem fraught with implicit symbolism or to carry an indefinite weight of synecdoche. So \u201cThe lights come on when we appear, and go off after we\u2019re gone\u201d is both another reference to the very modern, technological nature of this pastoral and a reflection on mortality, connecting with the closing lines, which allude to Rilke\u2019s desire to die at Muzot castle in the Valais:<\/p>\n

Who wouldn\u2019t want to die in a thirteenth-century tower
\nWith light sensors and cold running water
\nOff the hills and a chill in the sunny air of the contemporary archaic.<\/p>\n

Altogether, this is a book I strongly recommend for the pleasures of fine-honed craft and the way its distinctive voice takes the language in new directions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I would like to thank David Cooke for permission to post this review here. You can link to\u00a0the review section of the Spring 2019 issue of The High Window here<\/a> and find other people’s reviews of other books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One Lark, One Horse by Michael Hofmann. \u00a314.99 (hardback). Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571342297 Immediate attractions of One Lark, One Horse are the poet\u2019s sharp intelligence, spectacularly fine lexical sense and mordant wit, as in the opening of \u201cCricket\u201d: Another one of those Pyrrhic experiences. Call it an expyrrhience. A day at Lords, mostly rain, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-michael-hofmann"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2123"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2132,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions\/2132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}