I remember at university being told when I was struggling to find my own idenity and indeed voice as a poet, if you keep looking and reading you will find your own favourite poet over time. At the time I was reading loads of poetry including acts like Sophie Hannah, Lemn Sissay, Jack Kerouac, Tennyson, Joolz, Allen Ginsberg, Benjainn Zenhiah and Yevtushenko who wrote a lovely poem called Zima Junction among a variety of others but despite loving them all not really gave me any real clue who I wanted to be as a writer.
In 2000, in the middle of my second year I got persuaded to go and watch my tutor and a few others do a reading at the local Waterstones. Time has took away what I thought of the reading or indeed who I was seeing aside from my tutoor but I do remember winning a prize in the reading of one of three or four poetry books and I picked Hugo Williams’s ‘Billy’s Rain’.
I can’t remember why I picked up as I certainly didn’t know the author at that stage – perhaps it was the sad look in the painted woman’s eyes on the front cover with the cigerette in his hand or the very title itself ‘Billy’s Rain’. Who or was Billy’s Rain but I was curious and took it thinking it would be a load of rubbish and then missed my train back home completely engrossed.
Billy’s Rain is described as “The fifty poems in Billy's Rain chart the course of a love affair, now ended. Its complications, obsessions, evasions, secret joys and emotional pitfalls are explored with all the subtlety and irony of which Hugo Williams, among contemporary poets, is the acknowledged master. These are brilliant, wry and moving elegies for a love affair.”
It’s hard to describe over twenty years later what that book did as a poet I guess as I took it as a love story which simply went wrong in short, snapshots from a longer story which had to be read in order to understand the narrative.
I have got and had loads of other poetry in the run-up but there was some in the stripped down language here which really hooked me left, right and center.
Sections like “I’m writing it now –
disjointed scenes from our life,
its early promise, personal triumphs,
eventual loss of faith.”
were certainly nowhere as flowery or anywhere as technical as much I had read up to that point in my then fledging poetry career but had a earthyness that really hit me and stays me even now.
It’s ironic too I guess that I only found out a few years ago that the book was indeed about a affair that the poet had behind his wife’s back which by consicence I was then working on a long standing project called ‘Changing Carriages at Birmingham New Street’ (which hopefully will be finished in either 2022 or 2023) which has a influence of Williams.
This book works for me as through the subtle nature as it doesn’t tell you everything and considering it foxed me for nearly 15 years with its undertoe of a message doesn’t surprise me and I don’t doubt I will continue to draw more meanings out over the next twenty years.
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Andy N is the author of six full length poetry books, the most recent being ‘Haiku of Life’ and numerous split poetry books and co-runs the always welcoming Spoken Word Open Mic night ‘Speak Easy’.
He also a regular column on the Sunday Tribune and does ambient music under the name of Ocean in a Bottle.
He also runs/co-runs Podcast series such as Spoken Label, Reading in Bed, Comics Unity, Wrestle Up and Kol, Andy and Amanda.
His website is: http://onewriterandhispc.blogspot.com/
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Hugo Williams is the son of 1930s film actor Hugh Williams and model and actor Margaret Vyner, poet Hugo Williams was born in Windsor, raised in Sussex, and educated at Eton College. He worked at London Magazine from 1961 to 1970 and has also edited poetry for the New Statesman.
Williams is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including West End Final (2009), Collected Poems (2002), Billy’s Rain (1999), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, Selected Poems (1989), and his Eric Gregory Award–winning debut, Symptoms of Loss (1965). A selection of his freelance writing appears in the essay collection Freelancing: Adventures of a Poet (1995). His additional honors include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Cholmondeley Award.
(Originally published on the Sunday Tribune on 15 August 2021)
