The acrimony in Michael Hofmann's book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence 'My Father's House' records the son's growth from childhood to manhood, and the father's from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship. The father's absences and absent-mindedness, his tempers, adulteries and workaholism, his patronising of his wife and children - these sins and omissions are meticulously totted up. No physical detail is spared: with the peeled senses of adolescence, we smell the father's 'salami breath', observe the 'bleak anal pleats' under his eyes and the 'red band of eczema' across his chest, hear him chewing and snorting his way through meals. The son, with his 'thin, witty, inaudible voice', seems a pale shadow beside him, the usual fate of sons in filial accounts of this kind: it is almost incidentally that we learn of his education in an English public school (his parents return to Germany) and of assorted part-time jobs in his teens. His mother appears small and shrewish, Gertrude to a Morel not a Claudius, in awe of her husband's animal cunning; the son takes her side and does the necessary ('It's up to me to be the man of the house'), but she is allowed only two poems to voice her own complaints. It is left to her son to do most of the accusing:

LRB 20 November 1986 | PDF Download