Book description
Welcome to the Café des Artistes. Your host, the owner, bartender,
master of ceremonies and only other guest: John Hartley Williams. Here
you will be entertained and diverted - by bizarre stories of mapless
roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones
of Bonehenge; by a spooked version of Rimbaud's 'La Bateau Ivre'; by
encounters with Malcolm Lowry, the floating dead, the 'old men behind
the waterfall' and the knitted poet; by poems about donkey jackets and
dancing with donkeys, and a one-sided conversation with a decidedly
un-Romantic polar bear two doors down from Dove Cottage.
Long celebrated for his ranging, restless imagination, his baroque,
elliptical narratives, his manic humour and maverick stance, Williams
returns with another invitation to join him for a jug or two of wine
in his out-of-kilter universe: a world that is both strange, and
strangely familiar. Welcome to the Café des Artistes!
John Hartley Williams is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist
and critic. He has published nine collections of poetry, including
Blues
(2004), two of which have been shortlisted for the T. S Eliot Prize and
he won the Arvon International Poetry Competition in 1983. He has also
written a romance,
Mystery in Spiderville
(2002), and co-edited
Teach Yourself Writing Poetry.
He teaches English at the Free University of Berlin
and has lived in Berlin since 1976.
