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.



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