Nights in the Iron Hotel

Michael Hofmann a much-praised contributor to <i>Poetry Introduction 5</i> was born in Germany in 1957 but brought up in Britain. <i>Nights in the Iron Hotel</i> 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' <br><br>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 <i>brio</i>.