Nights in the Iron Hotel - Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann, a much-praised contributor to Poetry Introduction 5, was born in Germany in 1957 but brought up in Britain. Nights in the Iron Hotel,
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,'

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 brio.