One Lark, One Horse by Michael Hofmann; Green Noise by Jean Sprackland; The Scottish Ambassador by Robert Crawford - review by Peter Scupham

Peter Scupham

Home & Away

One Lark, One Horse

By

Faber & Faber 90pp £14.99

Green Noise

By

Jonathan Cape 52pp £10

The Scottish Ambassador

By

Jonathan Cape 54pp £10
 

One lark, one horse? The epigraph for Michael Hofmann’s new collection is a jest quoted in Carole Angier’s biography of Primo Levi. Goldberg sells pâté – lark pâté. Cohen asks how he can afford to. Goldberg says he adds a bit of horse. ‘How much horse?’ ‘One lark, one horse’ comes the answer. 

Now sixty-one, Hofmann plays with ageing in poems that act as a kind of antechamber to Larkin’s ‘The Old Fools’. In ‘LV’ he conjures up the years ‘of stiff joints and the small pains/that will do me in’; in ‘On Forgetting’ he describes how ‘My spelling isn’t what it was.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter