MH2

"I haven’t written so many poetry books – four – that they aren’t all important to me, if that doesn’t sound a little plaintive. But with its two-part organization, and the clutch of poems about my father and growing up and so on, I suppose Acrimony packs the most punch. It seems like a book I might have written on purpose, and not like the others, which contain more or less whatever I managed to write over a certain period. I still feel close to the poems in it – especially in the first, non-father, part – which is a little alarming, after almost twenty years. Somewhere in there is the clue too to why I haven’t written more, and why I’m hardly writing anything now. There doesn’t seem to me much wrong with what I have written, but at the same time I don’t want to write any more of it; I’m looking – or waiting – for some kind of new orientation. I’m not sure to what extent I’ve failed – dried up or gone away – and to what extent I’m doing what I always did and always wanted to do, which is a mix of things."

(Michael Hofmann, Interview, 2005)