“It’s almost as though my poetry is an extended passport application… It’s an attempt to be naturalized. I think I’ve failed to be naturalized and therefore there is this German residue about things. It’s something I feel haunted by…”
I’m delighted that the first poet to appear on Podularity is Michael Hofmann. I’ve known Michael for several years and greatly admire his work as a translator, but his poetry has been a comparatively recent – and very pleasurable – discovery for me.
George Szirtes, reviewing Michael’s Selected Poems in the Guardian recently, said of his work:
In the programme we talk about Michael’s relationship with the German and English languages and how he moves between the two; his relationship with his late father, the German novelist, Gert Hofmann, which forms the explicit or implicit subject matter of much of his poetry: ‘these two men meet up to divide the world between them and this is how it goes: my father gets prose in German and I get poetry in English, and we each go away feeling happy’ and his fondness for depicting interiors, which in his poetry appear as ‘one’s exoskeleton, the place where one hangs one’s trophies or displays one’s wounds’.
In the course of the podcast he also reads several pieces from his recently published Selected Poems.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download