Approximately Nowhere

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Approximately Nowhere signals a turning point for Michael Hofmann, as the poet queries where the death of his father in 1993 has left him, both personally and poetically. Hofmann rose to prominence in 1986 with Acrimony, a scathing and often heartbreaking collection of poems to his father, the German novelist Gert Hofmann, who throughout the poet’s youth reigned like an angry god over the family home. With extraordinary emotional and intellectual acuity, Hofmann’s poems evoke his father’s monolithic presence through the smallest gestured and still-life details: the elder Hofmann’s ironic “tenderness for a butterfly”, his demands for tea that he leaves cold, a permanent arrangement of dried flowers “withered to articulate straw / that my father half-inched, / like a spindly triffid on the steel table.”

The new poems addressed to his father in Approximately Nowhere exhibit more pity than bitterness for “kleiner papa”, as well as the self-assured ability to do the unthinkable—depart prematurely from his father’s funeral. One poem aptly summarises the odd but effective range of emotions governing this new collection: “scattiness, contempt, emulousness, laughter, the hysterical use of the present tense.” Hofmann’s voice links the two generations: the weighty, learned, book-bound inheritance of his father versus the more anarchic voices of the young, who wish to “tear down the bookshelves and inherit the earth.” While some poems are addressed to a coterie of poets, others are attuned to the more free-form voices of bar-room talk and suburban isolation. Throughout, Hofmann’s primary poetic role—as a rapt audience to his own pain—remains clear and unchanging. —Gillian Forbes Pachter