John Hartley Williams

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Biographical note:  John Hartley Williams John Hartley Williams grew up in London and has worked in France, Jugoslavija and Francophone Africa. Since 1976 he has lived in Berlin. He has published nine collections of poetry, two of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The latest collection shortlisted for this award was Blues (Jonathan Cape, 2004). He has published translations from German, French, Serbo-Croatian as well as versions of the Rumanian poet Marin Sorescu: Censored Poems (2001) Bloodaxe. He has published reviews and essays etc widely in UK poetry magazines and literary journals. He has also written a prose memoir Ignoble Sentiments (1995), published by Arc, and a mysterious prose work called Mystery in Spiderville, reissued in paperback by Vintage (2003). A reader-friendly guide to the writing of poetry called Teach Yourself Writing Poetry, co-written with the Irish poet Matthew Sweeney, was reissued in a revised edition by Hodder in 2004. A privately printed book of poems and photographs North Sea Improvisation (2003), set in and around Cuxhaven on the North Sea German coast, is available from the poet.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713394
ISBN:  9781844713394
Author:  John Hartley Williams
Title:  The Ship
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-07
Extent:  144pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  210 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  John Hartley Williams may well contain several poets, all of them jostling for expression. These would include his younger self and many of his aliases, the lover, the satirist, the anarchist, the lyricist, the experimentalist, the saboteur etc. – all of whom are represented in this collection of largely unpublished work dating back as far as 1958, and ending in 1982. This marvellous book is organised not simply an ‘early selected’ poems, with everything arranged in chronological order, but as a coherent new collection epitomised by the title poem The Ship.

Poetry has a philosophical function: to place seriousness (often equated with reliability or consistency) in question, and thereby achieve the serious joke that conceals the fundamental unease without which things never will get better. This is not just irony, which is just a privileged form of time-wasting. The humour that the serious joke contains demonstrates how much of what we take seriously for granted is merely shadow-play (political speeches, the news channel, the oil crisis, supermarkets). The serious joke reveals the paucity of present day reality. It replaces the names of shadow-discourse with the names of things as they are: axes, bottles, carpets, dwarves, eggs, feet, geckoes, hats, igloos, jampots, kukudus, lampposts, mistresses, nappies, octopi, penguins, quicksands, rats, sausages, tubs, underwear, violins, whips, ex-wives, yams, and zoot-suits. If the names come at you systematised through the alphabet, so much the better; the alphabet is the most humorously devised system ever (it makes no sense). This book aims to give you things as they are, and to make sense through the fuzzy logic with which they are presented.

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Play The Ship (1.7 MB)

Table of contents:
Two Poems
Greed for Life
A Cool Seduction
Swimming at Night
The Jewel
A Little Greek Myth
The Sexual Aquarium
Hamlet Unbound
Heathrow
On the Royal Wedding of Princess Anne: November 14th 1973
The Permanent Secretary to the Minister for Home Affairs Offers an Explanation
Heroes
Summer School 1976
The Hang-Out
Literature
Amelia and Caledon
My Way
Hedge Poet
Cat Up the Tree
Summa Cum Laude
Lüebeck
Not a Description
The Secret
Song of the Grillbar Restaurant
Communications
Poem
Who Invited Carstairs?
Long John Silver’s Song
A Moment of Truth in Le Bar Du Chateau
To the God of Creative Writing
Money
Time and Western Man
The Dwarf
The Dentist
My Friend Moultby
Lament for the Subotica-Palić Tramway
Ten Poems for Treasure
The Ship
Flea Market
Four Seasons
My Father was an Interventionist
On First Looking into Gittings’ ‘Keats’
Going Home
Two for Nerval
Magyarország
Ode to a Paella
Five Anecdotes of the Count
Moment Abbey
Pan’s Joke

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Excerpt from book:  

The Ship

The light weakens toward death.
Changes are bred in time.
Out of the chalice, the silver bud,
the frame of energy holds the line.

Mazes. Stars. A clean abstraction
lights the world with gleaming rivers.
Forests, mountains vanish out of sight.
Emptiness the dream delivers.

Change from absence lets
the heart know truth it can’t admit.
The next requirement is: look.
The dark is close to where you sit.

Here in time the form of it:
a chair, perhaps, a mask, a loom?
A woman combing pale hair?
The devastation of a room?

Where you touch or lean, the light
is faltering. Vibrations mount
within the vacancy. Brilliant structures
shatter beyond count.

Will repetition free or kill?
The world’s a symbol, always loss.
Its lines and holy congruences
fall beneath the hush of frost.

Too late there will be penances.
The cries and damages will warn.
Too late. And then the birds will move
away across the sky to dawn.

And this exemplary, unbeaten ache,
this yearning outward like a ship
will curve in white trajectory to stars
that hold it silvered in their grip.

Unpublished endorsement :  Good poets are always pressing on: all too easily they can overlook their past achievements — work not sent out, left in a drawer or relegated after a change of emphasis. John Hartley Williams’s recent poetry is powerful and richly embellished. But, as this remarkable earlier collection reveals, so was what he was writing three decades ago. The Ship is more than a welcome act of salvage — it carries a cargo of lyrical, symbolic, Surreal and personal poems which pulse with energy. Williams’s eye is exact; his nerve never fails; his language dazzles. A welcome homecoming to an argosy, not lost, only delayed.

Peter Porter

Previous review quote:  If you truly want to write good poems, try the brilliant handbook ‘Writing Poetry and Getting Published’ by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams.

Ruth Padel
Independent

Previous review quote:  Blues opens with one of the finest elegies of modern times. Ken Smith, a great friend and fellow poet, to whom it is addressed, had many of the virtues Williams admires and aspires to: a serious playfulness; concern about history and politics; a disdain of fashion; and a determination to keep his language free from the abuse it is habitually subjected to.

Paul McLoughlin
Critical Survey

Previous review quote:  JHW, despite having been nominated for major prizes, and for all that collections of his have been PBS Choices and Recommendations, hasn't received the praise and attention he deserves. For his poetry comes at you from any angle. You could no more predict what he will do next – from one collection to another, from one poem to another, than you can know whether or why Cootie Williams will come after Johnny Hodges or Tricky Sam or Harry Carney. About the only thing you can be sure is that whatever he serves up will be well worth reading….

The 9 page poem with which Blues opens is part elegy, part meditation on and part evocation of that singularly gifted poet (Ken Smith), and is so prodigiously accomplished that you feel the poem on its own would be enough for one book. In a short review I can't hope to quote from ‘Fox to Earth’ so as to give any sense of how surpassingly good a poem it is.

John Lucas
Other Poetry