Nights in the Iron Hotel

'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.

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.

• | Author: Michael Hofmann
• | Publisher: Faber & Faber
• | Publication Date: Jan 21, 2016
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9780571327393
• | ISBN-10: 0571327397