Dear Room

by Hugo Williams

Dear Room is a worthy successor to Billy's Rain (1999), whose preoccupations and occasions it continues and ramifies, charting the 'angles, signals, orders, murmurs, sighs' of love, separation and loss. With grave good humour, ruefully exact timing and a scruple reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, these poems register the goodbye look of things, and ponder the difference between a good memory and an inability to forget. By turns candid, caustic and drastically self-accusing, the many tenses and afterlives of desire are parsed - in sawn-off monologues, short stories in verse, thumbnail dramas, splintery photographs. In poem after poem Hugo Williams joins a sense of things missed and missing to a redemptive act of imaginative capture, and Dear Room uncovers an ethics of the present, reminding us in the words of Philip Larkin that 'days are where we live'.'Possibly the most original poet of his generation in England'. - Edna Longley'Williams is a poet of such intimate charm, such grace and cunning, and such ordinary comical sadness, that he wins your affection and admiration' - Hermoine Lee, Guardian'His great subject is time, and time's power to consume both what is hated and what is loved'. - Helen Dunmore, Observer'Not since Thom Gunn's Collected Poems has there been a Collected as startling and poignant as Hugo Williams's Collected Poems. Williams shows us, like no other contemporary poet, what is so strangely undramatic about our personal dramas'. - Adam Phillips, Observer Books of the Year

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 9, 2010

Reviews

[Russio · Rating 3 out of 5]

More go than touch, this seemed ephemeral and indulgent at the start but a few more interesting poems crept in later in the collection, to whit: The Words, Black Border, All the Way Down, The Cry, Unwanted, A Game of Cards, Trains Pull Away Slowly, Gossamer Green, The Time of Our Lives. At their best they corral imagery to capture a feeling; at worst they are glib and trite about relationships.

[Laura Flint · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first time reading poetry for myself (instead of school or university) and well, I’m probably inflating my rating because I really enjoyed the process!

Some of these poems are a bit odd in content - some feel like an intrusive thought left on a page. Others were great little captures of everyday, ordinary things. Many felt like an insight into a man’s brain.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to confess that I was rather disappointed by Dear Room. There are some deep emotions here but the poems seem almost simplistic in their telling, lacking the concentrated intensity of image and language that I look for in contemporary poetry. That said, there are some beautifully observed moments that suddenly bring you up short: the remembered image of a face on a pillow in Unwanted or the sharp sting of memory when 'sometimes you see things the way/they used to be' in Trains Pull Away Slowly.

[Matt Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

After this I think he's my new favourite poet. I've had to go and order all his other collections.

The poems are all so well put together that they make it all look really easy. Poetry such that you don't notice you're reading poetry, it just feels like relaxing into some poignant reminiscing. Gently played all my emotions and made feel really content.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simply beautiful poems that encapsulate the banalities of life and love.

[Phillippa Mills]

effortlessly charming

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much wangst about getting dumped, but otherwise very fine.