HULSE, Michael (William)

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Nationality: British. Born: Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, 12 June 1955. Education: Hanley High School, 1966–71; University of St. Andrews, 1973–77, M.A. (honors) in German 1977. Career: Lecturer, University of Erlangen/Nürnberg, 1977–79, Catholic University of Eichstätt, 1981–83, and since 1985 University of Cologne, all Germany. Since 1986 translator, Deutsche Welle, Cologne. Since 1987 English editor, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, Cologne. Awards: Poetry Society prize, 1978; West Midlands Arts grant, 1979; Eric Gregory award, 1980; Bridport Poetry Competition prize, 1988; Hawthornden Castle fellowship, 1991; Cholmondeley award, 1991. Address: c/o Collins Harvill, 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB, England.

Publications

Poetry

Monochrome Blood. London, Oasis, 1980.

Dole Queue. Coventry, White Friar Press, 1981.

Knowing and Forgetting. London, Secker and Warburg, 1981.

Propaganda. London, Secker and Warburg, 1985.

Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis. London, Collins Harvill, 1991.

Mother of Battles. Todmorden, Littlewood Arc, 1991.

Monteverdi's Photographs: Nine Poems on Aesthetics. Applecross, Washington, Folio, 1993.

Other

Editor, with David Kennedy and David Morley, The New Poetry. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1993.

Translator, Tumult, by Botho Strauss. Manchester, Carcanet Press, 1984.

Translator, Essays in Honor of Elias Canetti. New York, Farrar Straus, and London, Deutsch, 1987.

Translator, Prison Journal, by Luise Rinser. London, Macmillan, 1987; as A Woman's Prison Journal: Germany, 1944, New York, Schocken, 1988.

Translator, Matisse, by Volkmar Essers. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1987.

Translator, Toulouse-Lautrec, by Matthias Arnold. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1987.

Translator, Chagall, by Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1987.

Translator, Gauguin, by Ingo F. Walther. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1988.

Translator, Munch, by Ulrich Bischoff. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1989.

Translator, The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. London, Penguin, 1989.

Translator, Cézanne, by Hajo Duchting. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1989.

Translator, The Complete Paintings of van Gogh, by Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 2 vols.,1990.

Translator, Wonderful Wonderful Times, by Elfriede Jelinek. London, Serpent's Tail, 1990.

Translator, Jan Lobel from Warsaw, by Luise Rinser. Edinburgh, Polygon, 1990.

Translator, Edward Hopper, by Rulf Guenter Renner. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1991.

Translator, Egon Schiele, by Reinhard Steiner. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1991.

Translator, Degas, by Bernd Growe, Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1992.

Translator, Picasso, by Ingo F. Walther. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 2 vols., 1992.

Translator, Gauguin in Tahiti, by Guenter Metken. New York, Norton, 1992.

Translator, Helnwein, by Andreas Maeckler. Cologne, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1992.

Translator, Caspar Hauser, by Jakob Wassermann. London, Penguin, 1992.

Translator, Lust, by Elfriede Jelinek. London, Serpent's Tail, 1992.

Translator, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. London, Anvil Press, 1993.

Translator, The Emigrants, by Winfried Georg Sebald. London, Harvill Press, and New York, New Directions, 1996.

Translator, The Rings of Saturn, by Winfried Georg Sebald. London, Harvill Press, 1998; New York, New Directions, 1999.

Translator, Vertigo, by Winfried Georg Sebald. New York, New Directions, 2000.

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Critical Studies: "Distinctions of Obvious Presences" by Bruce Meyer, Poetry Canada Review (Toronto), 7 (1), Autumn 1985; interview with Annie Greet, in CRNLE Reviews Journal, 2, 1992; "Poetry and the Gulf War: On the Use of Myth in Michael Hulse's 'Mother of Battles"'" by Goran Nieragden, in Anglia (Tubingen, Germany), 113 (1), 1995.

Michael Hulse comments:

When I was a teenager, I would discover Wordsworth's poetry and spend weeks trying to write like Wordsworth, then Swift's, then Byron's, and so on. It took a long time for me to acquire any real interest in twentieth-century poetry. Finally at university, where my main interest, studies aside, was in theater, I found my sense of image and rhythm possessed by Rilke, by Eliot, by Wilbur, and Plath. It was not until 1976 that these presences had become second nature to the point where I could write poems that were altogether my own, and the earliest of my published work dates from that year. If I still have touchstones, they are Chaucer and Goethe and the New Zealander Allen Curnow, whom I consider the great poet of the English language in our time. Among the critics of any interest my touchstones are George Steiner, Matthew Arnold, and the Coleridge who wrote the closing paragraph of chapter 14 in the Biographia Literaria. Poetry is a pluralist art, and I dislike the proscriptive attitudes that litter the shop. Dictates on form are nonsense. I consider that every form that has been used, by poets anywhere, is available to me. Dictates on content do not interest me either; my poetry can be about whatever it pleases, though I find my work tends to return to historical matters, to Germany, to South East Asia, and to sexual, social, and religious concerns. Above all, it matters that words are not only prettily arranged but have meaning. The games-playing aesthetics widely touted today strike me as obscene in their implication that human answerability can be dispensed with in the poem. Thought through to its logical conclusion, this position implies that poets can run the trains to the camps if they wish.

I should add that I believe my poetry to articulate my atheism, my liberal humanism, my Anglo-German background, and my various interests, and I hope it does so in a way that can give pleasure to a reader who shares neither my background nor my preoccupations.

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Michael Hulse is a poet needed at the end of the twentieth century. His resolute internationalism, his intellectual curiosity, and his concern with metaphysical issues are to be rejoiced in. Some of the poems collected in Eating Strawberries in the Necropolis and Mother of Battles, both published in 1991, show how earlier work in mastering basic techniques—syllabics and alliteration—has paid off.

For example, in "The Country of Pain and Revelation," the syllabic count cools to chilling effect the picture of the aftermath of a road accident:

   The woman sitting on the glinting barrier
   watching a stir of air relentlessly uplift
   the silver undersides of leaves
   is breathing very carefully, as if
 
 
   afraid that she might be too tender for breathing.
   Her hand is resting in the dusty hair of the
   man lying jack-knifed on the grass …

And looking at the imagery here, we note how the health of the "glinting" barrier and the "silver undersides of leaves" is contrasted grimly with the "dusty" hair of the man. The lack of bombast heightens the effect.

In the same volume the sequence of poems after the painter Winslow Homer movingly depicts the sad spiritual honesty of the atheist and suggests how the metaphysicality of such a writer goes deeper than that of one or two triumphalist Christians. He may well yearn for

   a statement of belief
   said like a charm against the night

but "we are," he bleakly concludes, "on a godless tide /rowing home."

In his earlier work Hulse had worn his German learning rather too brashly. Once, in a review in the little magazine Acumen (April 1987), he rubbished the

   prettier kind pastoral which … seems to have fallen
   short of grasping the implications of the act of writing

that characterizes much English verse. He had a good point and made it well. But his impressive litany of cosmopolitan influences occasionally embarrasses even the most Europhiliac reader: "For Gustav Klimt … To Franz Kafka … After Vladimir Bukovsky …" There is a certain clubbish exclusivity in some of the work.

The other problem concerns technique, for example, the overvisibility of his syllabics and his reliance on alliteration and assonance. In "Fornicating and Reading the Papers" there are groups of lines that are banal in their effect, and Margaret Thatcher, one of the presumed targets of "Nine Points of the Nation" deserves fiercer than this. In "Snakes" (the poem reads to me like an early draft of what might become a fine piece) we find an undigested line of ordinary prose that will remind British readers of Private Eye's resident poet E.J. Thribb.

But Hulse can write about sexual love, spiritual loss, and the sense of living in a violent period of history with a strange tact and verve that makes me, for one, envious. The main elements in Hulse's work come together in "At Avila," a meditation on charity, Eros, and the muse of history.

Mother of Battles fuses ancient myth and modern history—the Persian Gulf War—in the manner of Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns, though in more melodramatic tones. This is, as Hulse says, "a noncombatant's poem," speaking for all in Britain under sixty who have not gone to war but merely suffered it by proxy on television and in print from afar. In places it can move to tears, bringing together all of Hulse's obsessions—love, death, religion, politics, and history—although, as he might say, what else is there?

   let me survive let me
   go home alive and be
   thrown out again of Tocqueville's

   Bistro back in Dayton
   oh I
   want to know the flesh
   the body and the blood …

—Fred Sedgwick