The most original aspects of Michael Hofmann’s own contributions to poetry involve his skilful manipulation of multilingual expertise, which contributes to his mobile and multifaceted style. These lectures continue this pattern by discussing poets working in four different languages: Rainer Maria Rilke (German), Arthur Rimbaud (French), Eugenio Montale (Italian), and Karen Solie (Canadian English). Hofmann is particularly good on issues of language and translation. Characteristically, Samuel Beckett’s translation of Rimbaud is described by Hofmann as ‘spirited but I think over-praised’; while he can be judgemental, he is also very authoritative on questions of translation.

Although this book’s connecting thread is ships, which Hofmann declares to have ‘an amplitude and a containment and a definition that makes them naturally symbolic or expressive’, there are also larger issues broached here, principally those involving exile and internationalism. In the book’s conclusion, Hofmann compares the invocation of these poetic ships to ‘a rejection of Brexit by other means’, a way of celebrating multilingualism and cosmopolitanism rather than the entrenched parochialism of just one national language. He is interested both in travel as a geographical phenomenon and also in cerebral travel between different perspectival horizons, and the poems he focuses on here exemplify these virtues of displacement in various ways.

There is, however, almost no critical theory here, nor any more general discussion of globalisation as a social phenomenon. This seems a particular drawback in his analysis of Karen Solie, whose discursive projections of the wider world from her remote rural base in Saskatchewan would seem to cry out for a wider conceptual frame, one implicit in the teasing dialogues between near and far in Solie’s provocative verse. But Hofmann instead sticks doggedly to questions of language, sometimes referencing his own poetry as a standard. Along the way, he makes some particularly illuminating observations on the ‘informality, scruffiness, demystification, drollness’ of the Italian poet Montale, whose rhetorical gestures in many ways mirror his own.

Oxford University Press advertises this book as ‘a spoken, almost improvisatory type of criticism’, but such an informal manner, which can work well in lectures, runs the risk of sometimes appearing lightweight when reproduced in print form. Hofmann also makes one or two evocative but glancing references to Les Murray and though these brief references are thought-provoking, Murray’s problematic relation to questions of transit and international mobility surely calls for more analytical heft than Hofmann is willing to conjure here.

This is a highly readable account of the uses of language and idiom in four modern poets, an exegesis that tells us as much about Hofmann’s own approach to poetic composition as it does about the writers he discusses. From a critical perspective, it nevertheless suffers what seems like a slightly desperate attempt to keep his lecture audience amused. At one point, for example, Hofmann compares Solie’s darkly humorous representation of The World, ‘a cruise liner of 165 luxury apartments owned by a community of residents who live on board as it continuously sails the globe’, to ‘the ’70s band Slade in their platform shoes stepping in dogshit’. This sounds a bit too much like the Winchester public schoolboy bemoaning the vulgarities of modern culture, and the lecturer’s joke here is perhaps not quite so effective as he imagines. As Hofmann rightly acknowledges, Solie produces a ‘virtuosic’ poetic treatment of worldly travel and its limitations, but his own treatment of her work is rather scattershot. Yet, at its best, it is extremely illuminating, as when he comments: ‘It is as though the poem were on the cusp of physical and metaphysical at the freezing point where the real becomes an idea, which is something that inheres in all great poems and stories of sea and shipping.’

Like other ships, the readership for this book will find itself bobbing up and down on the ocean waves, tossed from the heights of virtuosity to lower levels. Perhaps this is partly a consequence of the Clarendon Lectures framework, seeking as it does to mix insight with accessibility, but it also seems tied to Hofmann’s deliberate attempt to avoid critical depth in favour of a focus on the surfaces of language, something that manifests itself when he vaguely dismisses Solie’s exploratory poetic rhetoric as ‘philosophical, thoughtful, existential, whatever you want to call it’. Though Hofmann’s criticism is often perceptive, it avoids almost as a matter of principle a focus on anything other than language issues, and this risks oversimplifying the larger ambitions of Solie’s poem. Still, with their fine, close attention to the details of poetic construction, these interlinked pieces would doubtless have worked very well as a sequence of lectures, and they retain an equivalent interest for a wider audience in this archived form.