Billy's Rain

by Hugo Williams

The poems in Billy's Rain chart the course of a love affair that has ended. Its complications, evasions, secret joys, and emotional pitfalls are explored with the subtlety and irony that have long been distinguishing characteristics of Hugo Williams's powerful work.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 1999

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely my least favourite of Hugo Williams' poetry collections but this is due to the subject matter rather than the quality of the work. This book tells a story of an extra-marital affair from the point of view of one of the adulterers. Being a child of a painful divorce, extra-marital affairs are a sore spot for me and the woes of the people carrying them out are woes I have very little sympathy for. Still, good poetry, nonetheless.

Everyone Knows This

How am I feeling this morning?
Or is it too early to say?
I check by swallowing
to see if my throat's still sore.
I check by thinking
to see if my brain still hurts.
I'm walking along out of doors,
not feeling anything much,
when it suddenly comes to me:
I don't feel so bad any more.
I think to myself,
'I'll soon put a stop to that!''

My next book: They Came and Ate Us: Armaggedon II: The B-Movie

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Billy's Rain is a volume of poetry following the course of a love affair. I love to read love poetry. Coming across a volume of love poetry in a bookstore I have to take it home, unable to resist expressions of the almost inexpressible happiness and feelings of connections with all of existence that love brings. To me the articulation of love and its intensities needs lyricism. These poems by Hugo Williams lack that. This is love poetry without the euphoria of love. One can say that love is appreciation, and appreciation of anything is expressed well by lyricism. Williams, by presenting us this romance's setpieces and situations devoid of lyricism, metaphor, and wordplay has given us joyless poetry that doesn't seem to sing of love at all and offers us little to appreciate.

Rereading on 6 Dec 13, I enjoyed it more. In fact, I saw some emotional similarities to Walter Benton's This Is My Beloved, if not the lyricism. So I've rated it higher.

[Sibyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's one of those collections that feels rather like short fiction. The poems tell the story of a love affair from beginning to end.
Williams has a spare style of writing in which irony, wit and understatement are used to hint at underlying emotion.

At first I found Williams's (almost prosaic) plainness almost irritating. But as I approached the middle of the collection, I felt that this understated approach kept my attention. (Whereas with more overtly emotional, florid writers - Sharon Olds perhaps - the unrelenting intensity can get wearisome.)

A good many of the poems were familiar to me - perhaps because they'd appeared in (or alongside) reviews when the collection first came out. But ten years on, they stand up to re-reading.

And there's an odd way in which for all his apparent restraint, his attention to surface detail - Williams has as much depth as any 'confessional' poet.

[Angela Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems, as the blurb says, 'Trace the course of a love affair, now ended' and so are a mixture of the poignant, the yearning and the resigned. The poems are full of once-felt feelings, remembered meetings and redescribed lovemakings. In the title poem the couple sit in the back of a van on location listening to God's rain on the roof and waiting for it to end. But they need rain for the commercial or short film they're making and the woman asks, 'Why can't we use regular rain?' 'That's God's rain, said someone / It doesn't show up on film. / We need Billy's rain for this one.' That poem is a memory book-ended by (God's) rain that prompts the narrator to remember a code they once use for 'Let's get out of here.' He says, at the end of the poem, 'I'd say it now if I thought you were listening.'

A mini-myth for our times; and a perfect collection of poems to collapse into at the end of an affair.

[Andy N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't realise until after I had had this book for years that it was about a affair he was having behind his wife's back.

It adds a lot to it thinking about it in hindsight as I thought it was his relationship with his wife.

It adds a lot to it thinking about it and hits me twice as hard.

Love it. Wonderful stuff beyond words.

[Sophia Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I’m writing it now –
disjointed scenes from our life,
its early promise, personal triumphs,
eventual loss of faith.”

[Cass · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t really enjoy poetry that much but this was actually quite nice!! I don’t know if I would recommend it to anyone but it was a good read. My favourite was probably the first stanza of alternator or erosion.