The occult, the miraculous and the paranormal

I agree with mgranier that individual poems and their effects on us are ultimately more important than collections and I wouldn't be without 'Skunk Hour' in particular. I would argue that the stylistic link between Hofmann and Lowell is definitely there though rather than it purely being to do with subject matter. In fact it's so widespread I'm pretty sure the nods to Lowell are selfconscious, that there is an intentional intertextual dialogue. If you take a section like the ending of Lowell's 'Memories of West St and Lepke':

'Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair -
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections ...'

Hofmann uses an ellipsis (...) in every one of the 44 poems in Acrimony the same as Lowell in Life Studies uses them in over half the poems. Hofmann ends both 'Epithalamion' and 'Against Nature' with an ellipsis the same as 'Memories'.

Those triple adjectives crop up all over the place too in both poets. Earlier in 'Memories' there's 'Hairy, muscular, suburban'. And then in Hofmann's 'On the Margins':

'I stare at myself in the grey, oxidized mirror
over the fireplace, godless, inept, countrified'

and in the same fairly short poem

'Back here, I feel spiritless, unhappy, the wrong age.
Not to be condescended to, still less fit for equality.
I quarrel with you over your word 'accomplished',
and then slink off upstairs to make it up ...'

There is also the same strangely large amount of detail about minor characters in both poems (Hofmann gives a few lines each to summarizing the life of the 'youthful master', a 'little boy' and 'Eric'; Lowell gives a few lines each to summarizing the life of 'the man scavenging filth', 'a Negro boy' and 'Abramowitz'). There's also a similar use of disjointed sentences (the sentences in each usually enact some kind of shift of focus) and the poems both take place over many months, making shifts in time at the start of stanzas.

None of which is to discredit Hofmann in any way as I think it's intentional; I love Hofmann's work and as Chris says there is sufficient German distance to make him different. And I wouldn't be quite so harsh on Lowell as Gunn - it's just that there are about 3 poems of Lowell's I passionately like compared to a greater number for me personally with Kleinzahler, Hofmann, Bishop, Gunn etc.

To be fair to Lowell's influence on other British poets, I remember in the Poetry Review that came out for the New Generation poets, he was up there after Bishop as the most cited writer when the poets were asked (somewhat crudely) for their three 20th century influences.

Ellipsis.

Yes ellipsis is the word! I only avoided it as it can be confusing in textual analysis terms as it means, in a different sense, the omission of words from sentences which Hofmann and Lowell also do e.g. 'On the Margins' kicks off with 'Hospitality and unease, weekend guests / in this Chekhovian rectory painted a frivolous blush pink.' (And it might have looked as though I'd added in the three dots myself, as though the poem went on after the quotation.) Honest m'lud! Have tweaked now and will not repeat offend really I won't.