Michael Hofmann's new book of poems might be so long-awaited by now that some might have forgotten they were waiting. He has translations and essays to do as well.It begins promisingly with a Jewish story as epigraph, a prose piece ostensibly about something the culture has lost to technology, perhaps, and LV, a poem about being 55, which among other things is among 'the luncheon voucher years'. Much of it will be recognizable to any contemporary of Michael's and it is a fine poem until the last line,
...?
(sic), which is not a good way of expressing the great beyond but that doesn't matter much.
Portrait d'une Femme makes reference to,
Mary Elizabeth
Bott in the William books going
'I'll thcweam and thcweam and thcweam.'
It was Violet Elizabeth Bott, wasn't it. And now I don't know what to do. I look for Mary Elizabeth on the internet but don't find her. I haven't got all the William books upstairs but I have plenty. I don't remember a sister.
It can't be a mistake, can it. If Michael had a blind spot then Matthew Hollis is editor of poetry at Faber and he would know. Is it ludic, a joke or intentionally wrong. It is in some ways a poem about things being wrong, but then I might be trying too hard. I never accepted the idea in John Fuller's Who is Ozymandias? that poems are puzzles set by the poet for the reader to solve- not all of them are and what if you can't. In a poem that is otherwise doing very well, I'm non-plussed when I didn't ought to be.
And for a while after that, reading the book almost in one sitting and almost from front to back, I've lost faith in it. Suddenly I'm critical and fault-finding but I still can't find my copy of Corona, Corona to check if it was ever thus with far too much listing, that get-out-of-syntax-free card, and recurrent wordplay that sixth formers might be pleased with but are unserious, and not really clever enough, like,
I want to take my place as a nationally - make that
notionally -
known professor,
which isn't an admirable goal, anyway, unless it's ironic. But I don't know.
The satire of Higher Learning, about how,
We monetize the university,
makes its point but isn't subtle. It must be one of those poems that the audience gladly laugh at at readings, delighted to be on the same side as the revered poet.
Or maybe it's my fault and I'm through with poetry. Not enough of it is good enough any more and I should stick to what I like. I thought I was doing that already.
So, I go back through to re-build a more positive opinion of a poet I was confident of.
Auden is surely in some imitation of the late Auden, discursive- some might say scruffier or loucher - style,
How careless, cheap and profligate we have become,
We have stopped shaving against the grain and in cold water,
and the good thing is, given the poems at the end of the book, On Forgetting, Cooking for One and Idyll, Michael isn't apologetic about this letting go.
There are hints of a personal bereavement but they are not emphasized or the grief flaunted.
The unfathomable pointlessness and ritual involved in certain days at the cricket is taken further than some of us have in Cricket although we might have to concede that occasionally when they do play and there is a point, it can be unbearably the other way. Even suspiciously so on T20 finals day.
I had made a note of an early theme of cheap sex, that isn't carried forward, and decay, which is more sustained in a standard-issue bemoaning of late middle age.
Well, it doesn't have to be like that. 'These days are ours' and 'we may not be the young ones very long', I often quote, ironically but not unenjoyably.
I will retrieve as much as I can from One Lark, One Horse. That story, from a biography of Primo Levi, is about how a shop does so well with its lark pâté. The proprietor explains he mixes some horse in with the lark. In the proportions of 'one lark, one horse'.
The title of a book sometimes indicates something thematic about it. I don't want to be left with the idea that it has worked on the monosodium glutamate principle of stretching a small amount of flavour across a large amount of food. I hope there's more lark to be found among the horse. In an age of taking offence, I won't be complaining that there's no need to eat either. If we can sort out the Mary Elizabeth Bott question, that will help.