One Lark, One Horse - Hardcover

Hofmann, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571342299 ISBN 13: 9780571342297

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2018

Synopsis

Michael Hofmann is renowned as one of our most brilliant critics and translators; that he is also regarded as among our most respected poets - 'one of the definitive bodies of work of the last half-century', TLS - is all the more impressive for his relatively concentrated output. One Lark, One Horse will be his fifth collection of poems since his debut in 1983, and his first since Approximately Nowhere in 1999. But it is also one of the most anticipated gatherings of new work in years. In style, it is as unmistakable as ever: sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate; and shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European imagination. Approaching his sixtieth birthday, the poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as ageing and memory, place, and the difficulty for the individual to exist at all in an ever bigger and more bestial world.

One Lark, One Horse is a remarkable assembly of work that will delight loyal readers and enchant new ones with its approachable, companionable voice.

About this title

Review:

Michael Hofmann's prodigious new collection, One Lark, One Horse ... heralds the return of one of British poetry's most brilliant talents ... deeply emotionally affecting, and Hofmann here attains a higher level of formal inventiveness and variety than in his previous volumes. Its cosmopolitan breadth is instantly infectious, and it seems quite clear to me that this is the perfect moment for Brexit Britain and Trump's America to reacquaint themselves with Michael Hofmann's work. -- Andre Naffis-Sahely, LA Review of Books

The poems form a casebook of displacements, pulsing with vernacular energy, full of gallivanting fun and close observation. -- Peter Scupham, Literary Review

'Hofmann has always been a highly visual poet, one who thinks in shapes and objects ... The occluded narrators of One Lark, One Horse are at once personal and remote, travelling out of, or into, "thickets of vocabulary". -- Declan Ryan, Times Literary Supplement

It has been twenty years since Michael Hofmann's last book of poems, and there is this kind of temporal strangeness in reading this book in that light. For instance, one wonders if an intelligence like Hofmann's, sceptical as it always has been, could have imagined itself here in the present climate. The pleasure of that intelligence, especially Hofmann's vast vocabulary is, as always, ever-present and in fact seems not only undiminished in these latest poems, but even more pronounced. -- Will Burns, Ambit

'I also recommend two superb volumes by poets, like Seeds, as European as they are British: Michael Hofmann's One Lark, One Horse and Jamie McKendrick's Anomaly.' -- Mark Ford, Times Literary Supplement BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Book Description:

Highly anticipated, this is the first new collection of poems in nearly twenty years from German-born poet, essayist and translator.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0571342299
• ISBN 13: 9780571342297
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 104