Tony Williams

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Biographical note:  Tony Williams grew up in Matlock, Derbyshire and now lives in Sheffield. He has published poems in a range of print and online journals including the TLS, Poetry London, Rialto, The London Magazine, nthposition and Shadow Train. He has carried out research into contemporary pastoral poetry, works as a freelance graphic designer and teaches at the Open University and the University of Salford.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715176
ISBN:  9781844715176
Author:  Tony Williams
Title:  The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Oct-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Elegant, intelligent, charming and memorable, these poems reinvent the pastoral for dark times, crossing the contemporary English landscape from the city to provincial towns and villages. Their stylish and original treatments of the dreamy, the nightmarish and the absurd are both accessible and striking, both serious and very funny.

Main description:  Potter down to The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street and find a strange landscape opening up before you: the city's dishevelled edge of huts and fallen fences slides towards a sullen and uncanny countryside.

Elegant, intelligent, charming and accessible, these poems reinvent the pastoral for dark times. They peddle dreams and nightmares, hollow laughter, elegy and joy, and use a spectrum of forms and tones from the prosaic to the metrical, from wry cynicism to high rhetoric.

Meet botanists, bastards, predators and prayers, the feckless and the dead, a lecherous Polish priest and Prospero as a game old bird, cigar in hand, mourning the proliferation of oiks like you. Pop in for a drink at the pub of the rural damned, dodge deranged farmers and deluded incomers, and make for the county town with its closed cinema and publicly-owned Scotch eggs. Find an eyeball in a wooden box. Discover the moral character of sand and gravel, play a quick hand of piquet and lie awake all night listening to the Dark shagging in the garden of a city terrace.

The poems in The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street are original and allusive, serious and funny. Their wit and charm plot new routes through familiar landscapes.

Table of contents:
Sand
How Good it Sounded
I Leave Myself
The Matlock Elegies
For My Brother
The Rubicon
Gawain and the Green Shade
The Lame Dog at Monyash
Landscape for August Natterer
The Town of K., in the Province of M.
A Missing Person
Notice of Death
The Civil War
Great Edwardian
The Vision
The Fence
The Corrugated Soul
Pressure
Bus Between Towns
A Lowland Palsy
Tenebrio
The Winter Silage
Reproductive Behaviour of the Dark
Argument About the Definition of Red
My Love
A Room of Old Presses Reprinting a Great Work
Poem for Tuesday
Ed Parsons Remembers
The Vile Organ
Metcalf’s Development
Homage to Julian Metcalf
You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’
Variations on a Form by Gottfried Benn and Babette Deutsch
Gravel
The Looking Behind Walls Club
The Old Harlequin
The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street
Late Schoolboys
In Praise of Tinkering
The Triumph of Orthodoxy
Icon of a Bloke in Glasses Opening a Window
Variation on the Fourth Eclogue
A Carp
Izaak Walton’s Flight
The Flowers Singing

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Excerpt from book:  

My Love

My love is like
a burning haystack in a civil war?:
I hide in the quiet farmhouse,
imagine history running away with her.

She brightens chapters of the classics
I have yet to read.
I read them. They are only books.
No whiff of her assured perfume

tightens the biscuit smell of their pages.
She is the rattle of a closing latch,
the subject of a conversation stopped,
the cooling coffee in a room I enter.

She flies with the birds I blunder near,
nips into doorways as I cross a public square,
confides in other people, and lives in the future.
She falls through my hands like water.

Unpublished endorsement:  These poems marry a range of technical skills with powerful imagination and wit. They are powerfully evocative of people and places and, in turn, both playful and moving. Tony Williams can combine memorable lines with metrical accomplishment — here is a new name that deserves to be noticed.

Robyn Bolam

Unpublished endorsement:  His poetry wears its erudition and breadth of poetic reading lightly, and this is the key, I think, to what makes him so interesting as a poet. He has a way of taking an obsession with (say) mode, and finding ways to explore it, misapply it, burrow through it, producing poems which seem both intimate and epic; seem to occur in a place which is domestic and real, whilst also seeming to be located in an entirely uncontained place, partly of history and partly of the imagination. Too often, poets decide to ‘have a go’ at something (a form; a mode; an ‘after’ poem), and stop at a successful deployment; Williams wants to possess it, and to bring it into some other state.

I like his poems for their strange beauty, and for the way in which they find intimate and unblinking truths in highly poetic strategies and material; for how they arrive in the reader’s mind with a lovely clarity of line; for their frequent wit and laconic take on both life and the poetry which tries to find an answer to life; and for their fearlessness in the face of debates about register, diction, rhetoric.

James Sheard

Unpublished endorsement:  Tony Williams’ first book gives a cunning impression of limitless invention – rooted in considerable rhetorical mastery, this is a far more engaging achievement than mere limitless invention, which any dreamer can experience on a nightly basis, and lesser poets approach by not knowing when to shut up. He turns with great suppleness from register to register, tone to tone, seeking out a novel perspective which always sounds entirely his own. A dead giveaway that he is doing all this on purpose is the fact that he can accomplish such feats in extremely short pieces as well as a number of impressive longer poems, and whether he works more formally or explores the prose poem. Death and the North, the eroticism of books, Tuesday, several trout – his cast of subjects perform extraordinary feats with their sleeves rolled neatly up and a deadpan expression (particularly the trout, obviously). European sensibilities are evoked only to be undermined in search of their less-expected ores. Vigorous digging in Rilke, for instance, means a fine poem emerges blinking, as well it might, in Matlock. Williams understands that wit, much as it may delight the reader, is always melancholy. The result is a voice with a unique lyric heft, its subtle praise-making poised between pity and dislocation.

W.N. Herbert