Book description
Hugo Williams's new collection summons the poet's past selves in
order of appearance, as in an autobiography, showing in poems as clear
as rock pools that the plain truth is only as plain as the props and
make-up needed to stage it. Childhood and school time offer up the
amateur theatricals of themselves, in poems of vertiginous retrospect;
other poems itemize the professional selves of the poet's actor-father
Hugh Williams (by now as familiar and frequently depicted as Cezanne's
mountain), while the narrator - 'waiting to step into my father's
shoes as myself' - teases out the paradoxes of identity and
inheritance After this searching portraiture of the poet's parents,
the chronology opens onto the broad secular thoroughfares of
adulthood, including a limpid arrangement of pillow poems which tell
the same erotic bedtime story in twelve different ways. Other poems
strike out decisively along roads not taken: meticulous
misremembering, sinister and fecklessly unfinished narratives about
the parallel lives of desire, re-enacting lost futures and
accommodating the irrepressible past as it keeps bouncing back
onstage. In these fastidious and sardonic investigations of the
fault-line between voice and projection, we admire once more the droll
fearlessness, the art of candour as practised by Hugo Williams in
this, his tenth collection of poems.
Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on
the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, since when he has earned his
living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy's Rain won the T. S.
Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002
and his last collection, Dear Room, was published in 2006. He writes a
freelance column for the TLS and lives in London.
