Messing About in Boats

An approachable and companionable book that honours and illuminates its subjects. Based on Michael Hofmann’s Clarendon lectures, this volume offers readings of four poems in German, French, Italian, and English, by Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Eugenio Montale, and Karen Solie. All four poems are on the subject of boats: ‘Emigrant Ship’, the ‘Bateau Ivre’, ‘Boats on the Marne’, and ‘The World’. The volume suggests an affinity between boats and poems, offers a partial lineage of boats in poems, and pursues four variant destinies: the boat that stays in port, the boat that gives itself to the world, the boat that is washed away down the river, and the one that goes manically and hubristically on forever.