John Hartley Williams

John Hartley Williams died on 3 May. His last collection, The Golden Age of Smoking, was published in April.

Poem: ‘Dan Dare at the Cosmos Ballroom’

John Hartley Williams, 8 July 2004

amor vincit omnia

Venus lies ahead – ball of mists and disenchanted fruitfulness, too hot for charity, too steamy for reproach, my mission crystalline as snow: to conquer what has always conquered us. Airlock doors slide open. They reveal the Mekon, president of Love Unexpurgated, a peagreen Humpty Dumpty on a flying plate, vestigial legs suggesting toxic misadventures at the antenatal...

Poem: ‘Requiem for a Princess’

John Hartley Williams, 22 September 2005

(i)

A penguin, a donkey, a piano. Their tinkle-plonky grief.

A station trolley rumbling over pavement slabs carries the deceased.

Black hearse, black iceberg in a warm dissolving ocean, it sails toward the gulf that it will occupy.

The flag is folded small, the folding of a child. Smoothed from the national laundry is a crease.

The penguin. Its raised beak. Its self-important air. An advice...

Poem: ‘On the Money’

John Hartley Williams, 9 March 2006

(Art’s story)

When I was young, I coveted the money and the woman, kept coaxing busy blood drops from my reluctant thumb, grumbled out the spell-cracked poems of a sorcerer’s apprentice.

No rich. No fetch the ladies, either. Then I saw an ad: ‘Join La Table Ronde,’ it said, ‘accrue the benefits of debt.’ I wrote for details. A pile of bumf arrived, a...

Two Poems

John Hartley Williams, 7 September 2006

Interview

Why do you write poetry?

Petals, aardvarks, goulash – there is no end to it.

I’m sorry . . . ?

I, too, am sorry. I am sorry for Petula Misericordia, her unrequited love for Dan Splendid, the mishap with the steam traction engine, for the question that comes next.

Obviously poetry is a passion to you?

By no means. What is it, after all – a collection of...

Two Poems

John Hartley Williams, 16 November 2006

Near Luton Airport

Its crest should bear a drinker kneeling, weeping in an hourglass: The Wigmore Arms is not convivial; its smeary panes admit October sun. On the wall, a picture of a tree whose earth is ceiling.

Was it spite? Revenge? Or for a laugh? Simple inattentiveness? Or was his face on upside down, the man who screwed it there? frown! you are on camera! ‘A member of our...

Out of the blue

Mark Ford, 10 December 1987

So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences