Hugo Williams’s most recent collection is Lines Off.
Our lesson is really idiotic today, as if Mr Ray has forgotten everything he ever knew about the Reformation and is making it up as he goes along.
I feel like pointing out where he’s going astray, but I’m frightened he’ll hold up some of my grey hair and accuse me of cheating.
How embarrassing if I turned out to be wrong after all and Mr Ray was right. Luckily,...
After we broke up and agreed not to call or write for at least a year, I found myself drawn for a little comfort and cheer not so much to the top shelf of W.H. Smith with its flesh-tinted offers of doom and gloom,
as the bra and knicker counter of Marks & Spencer, where row upon row of carefully labelled dream-tatters in chocolate and dusky peach seemed to encourage a humorous...
The lights come up, the stage is bare, the audience goes on sitting there, row upon row of gleaming teeth, set in expressions of dutiful mirth for something they have now forgotten. Someone has spilled an ice-cream cone from the balcony onto someone’s head. It trickles down over his forehead and from there down into his lap. We see the smile fade from his lips, the lips fade from his...
‘Sex’ seems to be a word that most people understand, so there is a fair chance that the woman will understand what the man is getting at when he mentions the subject.
Perhaps he is finding difficulty getting into the passage and it may be necessary to ask why. Perhaps she is dry because there is no natural lubricant for the penis,
or perhaps she is very tense and unable to accept...
Every year now you make your face a little fainter in its vellum photo-frame, as if you were washing off your make-up with a towel and catching the last train home.
You have forgotten how to storm and shout about the place, but not how to gaze abstractedly over our shoulders into this room that is not your room any more. What do you see
that we don’t see? Why...
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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