Verbal equivalent of fusion cuisine

What is the use of a review? In one of two "pieces" in Behind the Lines on Randall Jarrell, Michael Hofmann notes that the American writer at times regarded reviewing, the activity of dashing off write-ups of new books for people "resolutely uninterested in one's subject", as like raining into the sea. Resisting Jarrell's simile for futility and disappearance, Hofmann has found new use for and, he hopes, given new value to some of the "carbons, photocopies and newsprint" that have piled up in the course of his own reviewing career; "salvaging", as he puts it, "the lost prose" that he once wrote to keep "his hand in" and "his name before the public" by reissuing it between the durable covers of a hardback book.

As a young poet and PhD student at Cambridge in the early Eighties, Hofmann forsook the slow, staid work towards a definitive " contribution to knowledge" that academic rubric demanded and gave his time instead to the joy of " seeking to direct opinion", making his "contribution to debate" through reviewing. For Hofmann, whose name as a poet and translator is now established, the "swift, provisional, personal response" is a bona fide literary form with its own generic beauties; he describes reviewing "as unrepeatable, as 'hot' and as improvisational an activity as writing poems". "I'm not a distance merchant, but a sprinter," he confesses, and his prose is duly dashing. Off the scholarly leash, Hofmann's facility with the language of praise and vilification is exuberant; he revels in the declaration and hyperbole that are the stuff of newspaper criticism, conveying with immediacy the stage fright, horror, apathy and occasional excitement that come with the reviewer's job.

Literary characterisations parade in cosmopolitan profusion and colour through his writing. Recherch? imported epithets combine with English and American slang in a piquant verbal equivalent of fusion cuisine. He memorably describes one forgettable foreign novel as a "versnobter bonkbuster"; excoriates the "little dickhead sentences" that characterise another example of "export-quality horseshit" from Eastern Europe, and indulges in passing in a timely lament over the insularity and poor judgment of British publishers when they come to consider translations of foreign literature. Hofmann's reviews are themselves a valuable corrective to such insular tendencies, ranging with energy and authority across the works of 20th century American, British, German, Italian, and Russian poets and novelists: among them Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara, James Buchan, Rilke, Brecht, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, and Joseph Brodsky.

The risk Hofmann takes in putting together this book is in the attempt to negotiate a permanent status for a series of literary excitements that are, by their very nature, free, of the moment, disappearing; it outweighs any of the dares on his own high-velocity attention that he has risen to in his years as a reviewer. His title, Behind the Lines, deliberately suggests danger as well as insight; this particular "reading pro" is, he himself proposes, operating in enemy's country with "uncommon wariness and transgressiveness".

Hofmann has connected brevity and risk elsewhere in his writing. In the seven-line poem June in his 1999 collection Approximately Nowhere, fragmentary linguistic forms are imaginatively linked with the heat, intensity, and passing pleasure of a transgressive love affair: "Short forms. Lines, sentences, bon mots./ Part of an afternoon, a truncated night./ ... never a day and a day and a day ... / Our honeymoon epic in illicit instalments." But can one really craft a durable form out of a series of quick, risky "out-takes" as the blurb calls them, or even, to use his own analogies, a satisfying mosaic or collage? The hope that occasional notices might stay "hot", or even gain "in interest, in value, in resonance" proves most vain in the theatre write-ups and random "book of the year" paragraphs that appear in a state of studied disarray, sometimes entirely undated and unattributed, alongside the more substantial reviews in this collection. Hofmann's public must be resolutely more interested in the jazzy style of his lines, sentences, and bon mots than in his subject matter if they are to gain much instruction or delight from his comments on the actors' performances in a National Theatre production of Shakespeare's Pericles that closed seven years ago.