Hoffman, like Winters, like the New Critics, like Berryman, Jarrell, Hollander, and a few others, is one of the minority of true writer/scholar/teacher hybrids whose intelligence turns as naturally to the crafting of creative scholarship as to poetry (if not perhaps with equal pleasure)….

If Hoffman is an academic professional, if he values, modifies, and uses easily the traditional forms of poetry in English, his own poetry would nevertheless be incorrectly characterized as "academic" if the term means drily bookish, bloodless, "dissociation from nature." Nor is it "intellectual," for all its intelligence; nor is it difficult of access, though the later work yields much of its potential quality and meaning after multiple readings. [Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba: Selected Poems] establishes Hoffman's as a poetry lovingly crafted, fine in its descriptions, haunting and strange in its myth-making, and increasingly memorable.

The pleasure of perusing this poet's work through the twenty years and half-dozen volumes represented in Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba is partly in seeing how the promise of the first two books—exuberant with experiments in form, sound, tone, the vocal exercising of a young singer whose voice is still changing—is fulfilled, thanks to all that practice, in a mature third book, and how it develops in range and grace through each of the three to fellow. (p. 171)

[Hoffman's first collection, An Armada of Thirty Whales, shows] him to be a person bemused and intrigued by nature, and by "natural" and "human" interactions; in them, natural things large as whales or small as mayflies often can be taken as metaphorical for human things—yet need not be. There is implicit in the closeness and care of his observations a love of clams for their courage, of snails for their concentration, the creatures rejoiced in fully as much for their own purposes as for any of ours…. That exuberance Hoffman brought to his early writing expresses itself in his sound effects…. Slant rhymes and curious rhyme games (down/ground/by/died) abound.

The selections from the second book, A Little Geste, contain similarly self-conscious effects (the sun "wimples the wakeless water"; truth rhymes daringly with sloops on the pure strength of a vowel) but works also toward an easier and more colloquial idiom, and at the same time toward Hoffman's major thematic concerns. The impulse to play games with language, have fun with the sounds of words, led him later to call a critical study Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe and make the title of this selection under review a palindrome—though it doesn't read at all the same front to back! In both the first two books he tries by such means to achieve compression, to pack the skins of the poems full; and if there are stretch marks and signs of strain, the practice was crucial to the achievement of the mature style.

With The City of Satisfactions, his third book, the idiom of Hoffman's poetry has become, as it has remained, direct and informal. The skewing and convoluting of syntax is given up; those verses freed of formal conventions are surefooted and language, no longer forced into richness, attains its intensities by means more subtle. Several poems chosen from A Little Geste, and all eight from The City of Satisfactions, vary as they may in length, strategy, and form, tap the deep sources of myth, or assemble the landscapes of dream, or of surreality, or shape some combination of these; and the mood of each is vaguely or forthrightly ominous.

The selections from the last three books, Striking the Stones, Broken Laws, and The Center of Attention, can in terms of voice be grouped and thought of together; all of them are finished, mature poems. Hoffman's interests have broadened through his forties and early fifties, and his poetry has broken new ground: of history, of industrial cityscapes and agribusiness, of lawbreaking. But the territory staked out in the earlier work—nature and myth—has been no more abandoned than the technical possibilities of rhyme and meter were cast off when Hoffman discovered in himself a gift for a kind of free-verse lyric of short strong lines. (pp. 171-72)

The love of natural creatures that sweetens all the books, especially the first, is balanced neither there nor later by the sense of a matching love of people. Hoffman's family occasionally make an appearance; but the impression prevailing throughout Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba is that of a private voice, a private sensibility, observing and imagining and responding primarily in solitude. Early poems are mostly unpeopled, but for a persona who often seems to be only fractionally the poet. More recent work reveals an interest in crowds and rare characters; a group of poems in The Center of Attention features people known or imagined…. Hoffman's feelings sometimes seem less under wraps when he's writing about, for instance, the fidelity of mated eagles than when he presents human situations certainly chosen because they move him. In this he stands out against the group of poets called Confessional by M. L. Rosenthal and those called Autobiographical by David Kalstone, and indeed many contemporary poets seem more personal and open in their work. (p. 173)

Among the pure lyrics, emblems, narratives, and meditations in the last half of this collection are many more remarkable poems than I can discuss…. A chilling scheme "To rid your barn of rats" (by floating a wooden chip, big enough to hold up one rat, in a barrel two-thirds filled with water, then sprinkling cornmeal over the water to make the barrel look full of meal) illustrates one of Hoffman's most highly-trained and gripping voices, the voice in which humor and horror are somehow successfully blended. (p. 174)

Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba identifies this poet as one who, choosing to sing after enduring his own journeys through the dark places, has come a pretty fair way along the road toward his admirable goals. (p. 175)