Michael Hofmann, a much-praised contributor to Poetry Introduction 5, was born in Germany in 1957 but brought up in Britain. Nights in the Iron Hotel, which won the author a Cholmondeley Award in 1984, is his first full-length volume. Hofmann's poems are marked by a classical authority, a formidable ironic intelligence, wide-ranging subject matter and a unique tone of voice. 'You move the fifty-seven muscles it takes to smile,'
Hofmann writes in a poem whose subject is sexual tension - and immediately the reader recognises a world in which emotions are not the usual poetic counters but something truer, more complex and more painful. This quality of disenchantment is served by a deceptively laconic style of measured brio.
- ISBN10 0571131166
- ISBN13 9780571131167
- Publish Date 7 November 1983
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 15 January 1993
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Faber & Faber
- Format Paperback
- Pages 48
- Language English