Selected Poems

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'.