Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays by Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann - a poet, translator, and highbrow vagabond - has verified himself as one of many keenest critics of latest literature. accurately nestled among the covers of the place have you ever Been?, he deals a hand to steer us and an encouraging whisper in our ear, best us on a visit via what to learn, the best way to imagine, and why to love. And whereas those essays undergo sharp insights that may aid us revisit writers with a clean eye, also they are a narrative of affection among a reader and his precious books.

In those twenty-five essays, Hofmann brings his signature wit and sustained serious mastery to a poetic, penetrating, and candid dialogue of the writers and artists of the final hundred years. listed here are the quintessential poets with no which modern poetry will be incredible - Elizabeth Bishop, 'the poets' poets' poet,' the 'ghostly ability' of Robert Lowell, and the fellow he calls the best English poet seeing that Shakespeare, Ted Hughes. yet he additionally illumines the melancholy of John Berryman and the antics of poetry's bogeyman, Frederick Seidel.

In essays on paintings which are themselves artworks, Hofmann's agile and really good brain explores a panoply of matters from the mastery of translation to the simplest day activity for a poet. What those assorted gem stones percentage are the critic's insatiable interest and nice attraction. the place have you ever Been? is an unmissable trip with literature's such a lot impossible to resist flaneur.