Hugo Williams’s most recent collection is Lines Off.
Do you drop things? Do you trip and hurl cups of tea ahead of you, going upstairs? Do your possessions have a life of their own in which they dither idiotically on your fingertips, then make a sudden leap?
In a flash they find their new home in a dark corner of your room, a distant country. Your face turns red and your head swells up like a balloon as you make yourself bow down.
You see...
It was an old book about crime detection, with pictures of murders and the places where they were committed, including street plans showing you how to get there.
You were supposed to solve the murders then fill in the answers in boxes. It was like looking for the partner to a rhyme and not being able to find one.
As I struggled with my deductions I kept losing my place in the narrative,...
The long cry of ‘BOY …’, falsetto, travels down two flights and bursts like a blow to the head through the last door on the left where I am struggling with my essay on the American Civil War. My room is furthest away from the Common Room. Only Barnes is behind me in the scrum of tailcoats and bumfreezers jockeying for position in the corridor. He takes hold of...
Every other day I follow the route of the Midland Railway to where it cuts through St Pancras Old Church Cemetery. I might go into the church and heave a sigh or two before continuing via a gate set in the cemetery wall to the Mary Rankin Wing of St Pancras Hospital.
As a young man, Thomas Hardy supervised the removal of bodies from part of the cemetery to make way for the...
I suggested a brave new form of entertainment, one based entirely on the emotions – hope and fear for example, the idea being to do whatever you want, then describe your feelings afterwards. My whole body tingles with excitement because it’s my turn to be ‘it’.
Can you guess what I’m thinking? I open my wallet twice and look at my list of excuses. It’s...
It is a curious thing that of the three judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is...
The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S....
How much do love and sex have in common? Not enough, it seems, for them to appear together in anthologies, which increasingly cater either for the sentimental or the pornographic market. We need...
Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short...
Old Glory – the book written by Jonathan Raban – is an altogether different book from the Old Glory that was praised in the reviews, but it is no less wonderful for that. The book the...
Craig Raine’s second collection follows swiftly upon his first, The Onion, Memory (1978). It is as if the poet had been waiting impatiently over us, while we picked ourselves up off the...
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