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(More customer reviews)I heard John Hartley Williams at the Geneva Writers' Conference earlier this year, where he gave a brilliantly funny reading that brought the house down. I tried to buy his new book at the bookstore, but it had sold out (he told me he only had room for five copies in his hand luggage); I had to order it from Amazon. It makes most contemporary poetry look bland. It kicks off with a beautiful sonnet to wine. (Shades of Keats!) Then comes the best translation of Rimbaud's 'The Drunken Boat' that I've ever read - knocks Robert Lowell and Samuel Beckett into a cocked hat. Next up is a poem about a polar bear that wanders into Wordsworth's Cottage in Grasmere. It's funny but deadly serious at the same time. Williams read this in Geneva and people sitting next to me shouted 'Bravo!' when he read it. You wonder as you read how Williams can keep raising his game with each fresh start; every poem is a gem, and each one unique in approach and attack ' different stanza shapes, rhyme or free verse or syllabics. Maestro stuff! Try his amazing sad and comical elegy for Princess Diana, or another brilliant translation (of Propertius), called 'The Revenant' or 'Last Letter to Zou-Zou'. Williams said in Geneva that every book of poems should contain at least one true love poem and this is it, the love poem of the millennium. For me it is, anyway. Hilarious and incredibly sad. Check this book out before you die!
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Welcome to the Café des Artistes. Your host, the owner, bartender, master of ceremonies and only other guest: John Hartley Williams.Here you will be entertained and diverted - by bizarre stories of mapless roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones of Bonehenge; by a spooked version of Rimbaud's 'La Bateau Ivre'; y encounters with Malcolm Lowry, the floating dead, the 'old men behind the waterfall' and the knitted poet; by poems about donkey jackets and dancing with donkeys, and a one-sided conversation with a decidedly un-Romantic polar bear two doors down from Dove Cottage.Long celebrated for his ranging, restless imagination, his baroque, elliptical narratives, his manic humour and maverick stance, Williams returns with another invitation to join him for a jug or two of wine in his out-of-kilter universe: a world that is both strange, and strangely familiar. Welcome to the Café des Artistes!
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