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>.