Fast Music
Published on 2. May 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-0-571-38261-3 (ISBN)
Description
'He's a poet of such intimate charm, such grace and cunning, and such ordinary comic sadness, that he wins your affection and admiration.' Hermione Lee, Guardian
Fast Music refers as much to the fast dance music that caused Williams to run round the room on the furniture aged three as to the speed of life, thought and to poetry itself, which works harder and faster than ordinary speech. In a poem about his typewriter, the 'undiscovered islands' are the many and various extraordinary subjects which rise out of the sea of his daily life, to be caught between the rollers of his beloved Adler Gabriele:
'Words returning with a bang and a bell
to the left-hand margin,
pausing for a moment to reflect on the scene.'
Fast Music ranges from wide-eyed school days to a full-blown sequence of love sonnets, to an ode to Brighton's West Pier and the inevitable helter-skelter of fate.
Fast Music refers as much to the fast dance music that caused Williams to run round the room on the furniture aged three as to the speed of life, thought and to poetry itself, which works harder and faster than ordinary speech. In a poem about his typewriter, the 'undiscovered islands' are the many and various extraordinary subjects which rise out of the sea of his daily life, to be caught between the rollers of his beloved Adler Gabriele:
'Words returning with a bang and a bell
to the left-hand margin,
pausing for a moment to reflect on the scene.'
Fast Music ranges from wide-eyed school days to a full-blown sequence of love sonnets, to an ode to Brighton's West Pier and the inevitable helter-skelter of fate.
More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 188 mm
Width: 124 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
106 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-571-38261-3 (9780571382613)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, and since then he has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy's Rain won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published in 2002 and his last collection, Lines Off, was published in 2019. In 2004 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.