Hugo Williams’s most recent collection is Lines Off.
How beautiful it would be to wait for you again in the usual place, not looking at the door, keeping a look out in the long mirror, knowing that if you are late it will not be too late, knowing that all I have to do is wait a little longer and you will be pushing through the other customers, out of breath, apologetic. Where have you been, for God’s sake? I was starting to...
It might have been the word for sulking in animals, Juliette Lewis, Joan of Arc, the smell of television lingering in the morning like a quarrel. It might have been an airedale scratching at your door, papier-mâché heads, a cloud no bigger than ...
It might have been blue satin, Peter Stuyvesant Gold, Deep Heat, umbrella pines, familiar two-note calls repeated at intervals,...
As I grew warmer and the bus went over the bumps, I let my mind wander further and further, checking my scowl in the window of the bus against my chances of bending her over that table, the arm of that chair.
When she answered the door in her low-cut dress I forgot what it was I was going to do to her. I gave her a kiss and asked if she was ready to go out, checking my smile in the...
I’m lying awake somewhere between the double yellow light of the Dimplex thermostat and the winking eye of the fax, making the journey across town, past all the stations in North London, going over Bishop’s Bridge, entering the badlands.
I hear your giggles as I hit the bumps in the curved section of Westbourne Park Road. I see the crack of light in your curtains when I...
I looked up from my plate and saw the ghost of my father’s smile separating like milk across the dining table.
I sat there as usual, a fork in one hand, a knife in the other, and neatly, precisely, divided myself in two.
The FallMy father lived in the Garden of Allah, an exotic, bungalow-style hotel which Thomas Wolfe told Scott Fitzgerald he could not believe...
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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