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“... 1. I lie in bed, watching you dress yourself in nudity for your part in a story you are about to tell me. Once upon a time, you seem to say, there was a woman who took off all her clothes and stood for a moment with one hand on her hip. You have my full attention as you pile your hair on top of your head and let it fall down again. Up to this point I am familiar with the story ...”

“... You knew that the Mercedes was the ultimate gay motor, but did you know that the Corvette was the poor gay’s Porsche? That the Alfa Romeo and the Datsun 280-Z were ‘bright, snappy cars for gays’ or that the Fiat convertible suggested to a gay trick: ‘I am sporty, unpretentious and above all relaxed’? You could probably have guessed that the LA leather crowd drive pick-ups, jeeps and vans, which they park outside the leather bars to retire to, with trick, when the ‘back-rooms’ are too crowded with ejaculating cowboys ...”

“... As she lies there naked on the only hot Day in a ruined August reading Hugo Williams, She looks up at the window-cleaner Who has hesitantly appeared. Wishing that he were Hugo Williams She luxuriates provocatively, Her fantasy protected by the glass Or so she thinks. Would that this abrasive oaf Were Hugo Williams, she muses – Imagining the poet in a black Armani Bomber jacket from Miami Vice, His lips pursed to kiss ...”

“... It is a curious thing that of the three judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come ...”

“... himself that love and writing have little to do with each other, one is inclined to believe him. Hugo Williams, who has a good poem about the sticky relationship between making love and making verse (LRB, 8 December 1988), is one of the few contemporary English poets who makes a good showing in both the Whitworth and the Fuller. That particular poem ...”

“... home      mooned in a window as if she had stayed on a train one stop past her destination. Hugo Williams is one of many modern writers whose work one might see in relation to Life Studies. If home territory is one of the great themes of this century’s verse, then Williams, though a kind of retreating ...”

“... but this disorientation is part of the pleasure of following Reid around his self-created world. Hugo Williams’s Love-Life leaves much to be desired, like most people’s. I like the look of the book, and the illustrations by Jessica Gwynne. Williams himself writes the sort of poetry for which people used to be ...”

“... are, the less I know what to do with John Fuller’s well-made poems. ‘Leaving school’, from Hugo Williams’s Writing home, has 30 lines, of which 11 begin with the first-person-singular pronoun. It occurs 14 times in ‘Scratches’, a poem of 24 lines. Two pieces, ‘A Little While Longer’ and ‘Slow Train’, begin with ‘My father’, while ...”

“... models, yet the voyage that produced this sage and magnanimous book must be counted as a triumph. Hugo Williams made an American voyage also, but he might as well have stayed home. No particular place to go records the trivialities and absurdities of a poetry-reading tour from New York to California and back. Where Raban finds unexpected depths, ...”

“... of the book is taken up with a series of letters written over a period of years by Pitt-Kethley to Hugo Williams, in the hope that he would finally come to requite her love for him. She offers these letters to the world as evidence of her real self. They are truer than her other writing, she says, because ‘they reveal all of myself – the tender side ...”

“... going to an unexciting location and reporting on his lack of excitement; Jonathan Raban and Hugo Williams purvey this mode as well. Is it that old-style travellers chose their destinations better? Did they perhaps fake their enthusiasm? Or was the world simply fresher then? Today’s travellers may claim a greater truthfulness by reporting their ...”

“... he trumpeted. ‘He is merely the first. It is the restart of civilisation.’ William Carlos Williams, working fairly happily as a doctor in New Jersey, was to be Pound’s second escapee. Marianne Moore might be his third. At one stage, he envisaged annual liberations – assuming, of course, that a sufficient supply of stifled talent was available. The ...”

“... profile of Ms Pitt-Kethley in the Independent on Sunday: one hopes, for her sake, that the poet Hugo Williams is not of a litigious cast of mind. (The same newspaper, incidentally, gave Richard Rayner space for a memoir of his father, whose resemblance to Jack Haymer was freely declared.) As one might expect, Ms Pitt-Kethley’s relentless vituperation ...”

“... It’s someone’s piss, not even mine, And now instead of riding pillion My head is under Hugo Williams. This is funny, but Porter’s real ‘bad dreams’ were worse. When he relaxed the cleverness and the deflection of pain through irony, they kept coming back. ‘I cried for sheer simplicity/as though I took an everlasting heart/from my ...”

“... after Victor Hugo Two bullets to the head, the child had taken. It was a clean, honest, humble, quiet place. In blessing, above a portrait, hung a palm cross. His aged granny stood there, trembling, lost. In silence, we removed his clothes. His mouth hung open, pale, the eye-life drowned in death. Each arm fell useless from its socket ...”