Daniel G. Hoffman

"Many memoirs have been written by veterans of the European and Pacific theaters of action, but this book, by former poet laureate Daniel Hoffman, is among the first by a noncombatant, describing unusual experiences in military and civilian life on the home front.". "A chance summer job while in college led, after a few weeks, to Hoffman's writing instruction manuals for the P-47C and B-17F. Called up in the Enlisted Reserve, he was sent to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. At twenty, he was given more responsibility than he has ever held since: directing the AAF Technical Data Digest, an abstracts journal that covered every phase of aeronautical research and development relevant to the Army Air Force. It was sent to air bases around the world, military contractors, and all Allied air attaches. This is a hitherto untold report of how the AAF retrieved and distributed essential technical data before the invention of computerized information processing." "Challenging as this assignment was, Hoffman, knowing that his friends and classmates were facing death overseas, was beset by survivor's guilt, in the end accepting that he could but do what his assignment required him."--BOOK JACKET.

Part family romance, part deconstructed novel, Middens of the Tribe repossesses for poetry a range of experience long ceded to fiction. With his well-tuned ear for the rhythms of speech and his resourceful versing, Daniel Hoffman explores the consonances and contrasts between interconnected lives in a modern city and an archaeologist's reconstruction of a primitive people's past: Can the middens / of the tribe I study tell if family / strife always reveals a culture's dynamics, / if, amid bones, flints, sufferings are the same? Leavened by touches comic and grotesque, Middens of the Tribe reveals, in the nexus of lives intertwined, a cubist rendering of intimacy, alienation, and loss.

A critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's work by Daniel Gerard Hoffman, American poet, essayist, and academic, who was appointed the twenty-second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973.