André Naffis-Sahely

For more than four decades, Michael Hofmann has made significant contributions to the literary cultures of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, ranging from his original poetry to translations of Kafka, Brecht, Hans Fallada, and Joseph Roth, among others. In the first book-length study of this iconic figure, poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely surveys Hofmann's life and work with an emphasis on his poetry, situating him within the "New Generation" of writers, including Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, and Don Paterson, who rose to prominence in Britain between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. Reaffirming Hofmann's central place in contemporary literature, Naffis-Sahely presents the author's oeuvre as an "extended passport application," as the poet's unusually peripatetic nature emerges as a poetic means of questioning various modes of authority. Naffis-Sahely examines Hofmann's chief literary influences, revealing that while he was heavily inspired by the example of Robert Lowell's confessional model, his work was equally shaped by other poetic mentors, including Ian Hamilton and Hugo Williams. In turn, Hofmann's five published volumes of poetry—from his debut Nights in the Iron Hotel to his latest collection, One Lark, One Horse, published after a silence of two decades—chronicle the poet's sentimental and intellectual education from adolescence to middle age, as well as the traumatic emotional experiences that arose from his relationship with his father, the German novelist Gert Hofmann, whom the poet portrayed to shocking effect in his breakthrough second collection, Acrimony. Naffis-Sahely concludes his study with an analysis of the influence Hofmann has exerted on other poets, testifying to the value and importance of his work in the contemporary British tradition, followed by an extensive interview reflecting on his career.

There has always been an intense physicality to D’Aguiar’s work, matched by a penchant for geographic groundedness and a biographical perspicacity, that has made him one of the finest writers of his generation. What is most striking about this chapbook is how much keeps him dreaming, even in places and situations where many imaginations would stumble and falter in the face of the relentless violence to which we have all become far too inured. There is hardly a Black British writer working today who doesn’t owe D’Aguiar a considerable debt, whether they know it or not.

High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest. Exploring such key events as the First Red Scare, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the West Coast’s wildfire epidemic, Naffis-Sahely’s reflections on class, race, and nationalism chart the region’s hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the recent pandemic. The poems in High Desert also revel in their rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside of the US, travelling from Venice and Florence to Chittagong and St Petersburg, tackling our turbulent times and the depths of its problems in searing, extraordinary poems of witness and vision. High Desert is André Naffis-Sahely’s second collection, following his debut The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017), a gathering of portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. It includes poems from his recent pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). All his collections present poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision. André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator, and editor of Poetry London. He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School in the UK, and a Lecturer at University of California, Davis, in the US.

While half the world swept west,we trickled eastward, one by one,single-file, like fugitives. Next stop:Abu Dhabi, where my father had a job,and money, for the first time in years . . .__________________________________________________Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from present-day London to North America, André Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: labourers, travellers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. 'Naffis-Sahely's poems usher the reader in to a world of reversals and risk . . . His narratives hold memory to account'DAVID HARSENT