When Michael Hofmann's poems began to be published in British magazines in the early 1980s, they were quickly recognized as the work of a fresh and original talent. Though Hofmann was still in his early twenties, his work did not seem in the least derivative, and from the beginning he established an unmistakable poetic voice: flat, laconic, rarely rhyming, never getting above itself, preoccupied by the minutiae of modern (largely urban) Europe but filtering its observations through literature and the cinema. He has published only one full-length collection, Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), but his future already looks bright.

Hofmann was born in 1957 in Freiburg, West Germany. His father, Gert, was a German academic and writer, and when Michael was four the family moved to Bristol, England, where his father took up a teaching post at the university. A peripatetic pattern had been set: in subsequent years Gert...