The Ship

Reviews / Votes

Over a long and productive career, John Hartley Williams has always enjoyed launching poems that sail far away from land. The poems that make up The Ship are, it appears, ones that go back to his beginnings, though there's little sense of apprentice work here, let alone dewy-eyed rapture at sexual appetency, even though several poems appear at first blush to be about young love. No blushing for this poet, though. This is Keats reprised through the sensibility of a tongue-in-cheek Rimbaud (say). `I was standing in the station listening to/loudspeakers, when her sexy fingers//tickled my back. C' etait le coup de foudre!/A picture of ideological villains we were - la chap with slick chops, a dolly with/blind, straight, hair, speeding in a/coloured motor car to egophilia.' The decision to end lines with unimportant, casual-raggedy words, the mingling of linguistic registers (slangy idiom, codformality, neologisms, the sudden lurch into French), the cheeky-aggressive discomposing of readerly expectations (`are you sitting comfortably. Then watch out' each and every Williams poem seems to imply): these are all trademarks which characterise his later work. -- John Lucas * Staple * There is certainly a more melancholy edge to some of the work here, a sense of `inarticulate longing' more closely associated with a strict romantic sensibility, perhaps, but there is also the absurd humour, the sharp and acrid reek of piracy, as well as those hilarious narrative romps - Who Invited Carstairs? - for example, which are picaresque and swashbuckling to boot. John Hartley Williams is a much underrated poet and this collection of his early writing provides a rich and rewarding read. -- Steve Spence * Tears in the Fence *