Book description
Subversive and satirical, inventive, wry and unconventional, John
Hartley Williams has long been celebrated for his maverick
sensibility, for his outsider's take on the way we live our lives. In
Blues, his eighth collection, he focuses with new directness on
the turmoil of Germany and Eastern Europe, and writes eloquently about
being English, and staying English, in a continental climate, through
all the upheavals of the last fifteen years.
Alert to the intricacies and ironies of the language, to the
musculature of politics and passion, these poems are chronicles of
change, wired to the energies of jazz and science fiction, yet the
under-song is a threnody for the loss of a kind of Englishness -
voiced powerfully in a moving elegy for the poet Ken Smith. While
there is no diminishing of his comic brio, no dulling of his incisive,
questioning intelligence, Blues finds John Hartley Williams
taking on subjects of new depth and complexity - while maintaining his
characteristic lightness of touch, imagination and profound originality.
John Hartley Williams is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist
and critic. He has published nine collections of poetry, including
Spending Time with Walter
, two of which have been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He has also
won the Arvon International Poetry Competition. He co-edited
Teach
Yourself Writing Poetry
and he teaches English at the Free University of Berlin
.
