Book description
The long poem at the centre of John Hartley Williams' new collection is
a dramatic monologue narrated by a laconic, possibly lamed, forest
dweller, a lowly crewmember on a barge travelling an unnamed waterway.
Some of his remarks are addressed to his talisman, the shrunken head of
an African tribesman. The barge carries a sinister cargo and its captain
has a preference for sadistic sex. Other poems in the book undertake
journeys - to Northern Cyprus, China, medieval France, Florida - but
like 'The Barge' they're not exactly travel poems, more poems which
travel. Welcome to the unsettling world of John Hartley Williams, whose
restless, inexhaustible imagination, originality and maverick humour
have enlivened contemporary poetry for years. Paranoid, erotic,
disturbed and disturbing, these are bulletins from a dislocated,
parallel world that excites, entertains and terrifies - and often feels
more real to us than our own.
