As this latest collection, One Lark, One Horse, illustrates so vividly, though, Hofmann is a serial adulterator. His idea of poetic licence is an import licence, diversifying rather than polluting a version of everyday or correct English with all sorts of linguistic goods, with half a mind in German and in other lexicons as well. Whether the reader is annoyed or delighted by this aspect of his poetics probably depends on your attitude to language: do you want more or less? With Hofmann you always get more: terremoto, not earth tremor, Spelunken rather than dive-like, vieux jeu rather than old-fashioned, froideur rather than reserve, Recuerdos not memories, Stau not traffic jam, and my favourite: vulcanizadora (tyre repair shop). And he’s always attracted to the distinctively specific English word too: peculation, cyclothymia, deltoids, foulard. Glitches of association occur occasionally; they hardly make sense but are somehow admirable for their ordinariness and humour – ‘little roosters, little rosters’, ‘The Golden Basket, the Golden Casket, the Golden Gasket’, ‘… it’s Compestela. Ah, Stella. / Stella or Vanessa, make a decision’. The volume’s title, from a Jewish joke, is another sign of Hofmann’s love of linguistic play and happenstance.

This foregrounding of language itself is no affectation, it is core. We have no idea who the woman in ‘Portrait d’une Femme’ is, but she’s a contemporary, an English rose gone ape. The most striking moment in the description of her is linguistic:

The venomous articulation with its
   trademark solecisms
(naive to wonder how anyone with a
   Cambridge degree in it
Could hurt the language like you).
   A sort of chronically over-emphatic
sub-style of maimed English,
   a testosterone debris of nursery babble,
pop psychology, tabloid yelp and
   obscenity.

Michael Hofmann (photograph by Thomas Andermatten)

Michael Hofmann is not much interested in over-explaining the situations and settings of his poems: where they are and whom he’s talking about. That doesn’t really matter, you have to pick up the clues: Tartu signals the Estonian river setting of ‘Dead Thing’; ‘Sankt Georg’ is about the changing urbanscape of Hamburg-Mitte; ‘Lake Isle’ is about an ideal place to live on ‘Danube Street’ (a reversal of Yeats’s Innisfree idyll); ‘LV’ is about late middle age (‘say, 1400 AD’); the opening prose poem is titled ‘Lindsay Garbutt’; about reading and nostalgia for The Velvet Underground – a German connection here, too, through Andy Warhol and singer Christa Päffgen. We have no idea about Lindsay Garbutt, unless we’re very in with North American poetry circles, until we get to the ‘Acknowledgements and Thanks’ page at the end of the volume, where we learn that she commissioned the poem (as associate editor at Poetry magazine). But still, why the title exactly?

This collection also includes a few poems about Hofmann’s experience in Australia, in Queensland where he was writer in residence in 2008. ‘Judith Wright Arts Centre’ is a disarming poem about the poet’s ‘office at the Judy! The Judy / at the head of Fortitude Valley!’ with its exuberantly Pinterest (not Pinteresque) snaps of Brisbane streetwear:

The pre-owned and the pre-loved, the
   much-travelled
And the want-away, the ripped and
   the buff
And the sweatered and coated, the
   baby-dolled and the muscle-shirted
And the skirts pulled over trousers and
   leggings,
And the flipflops and biker books, and
   tote bags and shoulder bags
Strapped across the bosom. (And it was
   all one style,
And the name of that style was called
   Alternative, or maybe,
Consensual Alternative at the World’s
   End.) The Judy.

Like this poem, the poems from Australia, ‘Letter from Australia’ and ‘Recuerdos de Bundaberg’ are as sharply attentive as the many other poems about outlandish places. Australian vowels may sound like ‘short i’s in words / like beach, bush or bake’ to English ears, but that’s just how he hears them; there is no trace element of Northern condescension here. After all, ‘the Beeb burbles all night / dreaming to itself in Queen’. Hofmann’s eye for embarrassing local detail is surprising too, he clocked the Neal–Della Bosca Iguanagate affair and Troy Buswell’s antics.

There are also poems of political commentary, sardonic usually, although these tend to be simply lists of outrages. ‘Higher Learning’ is one of these anaphoric pieces, a dramatic monologue by university management: ‘We monetise the university … we casualise the support staff … We free up tenure.’ ‘Silly Season, 2015’ lists global financial disorder, neo-Nazi terrorism, gun violence, ethnic cleansing as exhibits in the appallathon of contemporary political life. ‘The Case for Brexit’, anaphoric first person this time, lists the cruelties of English school life: ‘I should have liked to be called Roger or Arthur. The / bully Brian Lory pummelled and pummelled. All Trutex or Aertex. Caps Striped ties …’ Once again, it’s the linguistic signage underlying such schoolyard behaviour that he particularly recalls: ‘Practically everything was a shibboleth. Harwich was a trick. / Berwick was a trick. Worcester was a trick.’ Manchester textile brands Trutex and Aertex seem to suggest even the fabric of school uniforms was infused with the insolence and vindictiveness of persecution.

That’s all to describe some of the rich, strange, distinctive language of Hofmann’s poems, but there is another aspect that is equally important: the contrapuntal relation between the surface of his lines, the simplicity of his syntax, and the openness and often gentleness of his mentality. His vocabulary may be what is most to the fore in our reading of these mannerist poems. It’s what makes them like Arcimboldo portraits, the astonishing conjunction of what aren’t extraordinary linguistic elements in other contexts, but just in their being brought together in this particular fashion. But Hofmann’s syntax is nearly always simple, often tending towards the list, or even the note, the clipped, talky fragment. Sometimes the effects are a marvel of delicacy and resonance, as in the poem ‘Ostsee’, a colour snapshot of a moment beside the Baltic Sea. Hofmann has been wrongly characterised as a savage reviewer, the epitome of the transAtlantic, score-keeping literary wolf, when what he is, is insouciantly individual and honest, with a GSOH.