That Lone Ship

by Rhys Owain Williams

that lone ship on the horizon,
arriving or leaving?

From the very first page of this varied and engaging debut collection, Rhys Owain Williams invites his readers to pause. Here is a poet who is working things out, taking time to contemplate what it means to grow older with each passing day. The poems in That Lone Ship are often caught between two places – inhabiting the quiet spaces between childhood and adulthood, lust and love, heartbreak and new beginnings, life and death.

An acute observer, Williams writes with a sharp-eyed, questing intelligence. The future has as large a presence in this collection as the past. Restrained and elegantly-crafted, the poems in That Lone Ship resonate beyond the page, finding their footing between the known and the unknown, the said and the unsaid.

PRAISE for That Lone Ship:

"The decks of That Lone Ship fizz with the imagery of a changing seaside town. Its souls are chronicled with pathos and tenderness."
— Paul Henry

"Wide-ranging and intelligent, heartfelt and elegant – Rhys Owain Williams explores loss, love and a Swansea boyhood in poems that surprise and amaze."
— Joe Dunthorne

"Rhys Owain Williams proves himself a skilled navigator, charting a course through seas both calm and rough, familiar and strange. By turns moving, poignant, funny and undeniably local, these poems deal with place and people, love and friendship: Swansea town and its familial inhabitants in all their ugly (lovely) glory. That Lone Ship, whether arriving or departing, is one you’ll swim out to; one you won’t want to miss."
— Emily Blewitt

​"That Lone Ship is another kind of poetry collection altogether, barnacled with haiku, patched up with odd borrowings from reading, memory and the news, full of curious nooks and obsessions."
— Wales Arts Review

​"Rhys Owain Williams explores the ghostly ripples that are cast out by everyday happenings, reflecting on and weaving together the disparate strands of experience that make up a life."
— New Welsh Review

​"That Lone Ship explores [social struggles] from a different perspective: that of a working-class crisis of masculinity in left-behind communities...The "heavy silence of monoliths" in 'Bonaparte Before the Sphinx' is an enduring image emblematic of the whole collection: the unspoken words of forgotten communities and unwritten histories, time and history as silent monolith."
— Poetry Wales

​"Rhys Owain Williams is maybe a rare talent in poetry. His voice is strong, understandable, serious but lighthearted."
— Marble Poetry

ABOUT Rhys Owain Williams:

Rhys Owain Williams is a writer from Swansea, Wales. His work has been published in magazines and anthologies, and read at events, festivals and on national television. That Lone Ship is his first poetry collection.

Genres: Poetry

58 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2018

About the author

Rhys Owain Williams is a writer from Swansea, Wales. His work has been published in magazines and anthologies, performed at festivals and read on national television. Through his writing, he has also responded to various artistic commissions, with clients including Art in Site, Swansea University, Nationwide Building Society and NHS Wales. Rhys's poetry has been translated into Welsh, Greek and Latvian, and his first poetry collection, That Lone Ship , was published by Parthian in 2018. He edits The Crunch multimedia poetry magazine, and is a former Hay Festival Writer at Work.