Dear Room
By (Author) Hugo Williams
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
2nd March 2006
Main
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000
821.914
64
Width 126mm, Height 198mm, Spine 5mm
90g
Dear Room is a worthy successor to Billy's Rain, whose preoccupations and occasions it continues and ramifies, charting the 'angles, signals, orders, murmers, 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'.
Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970. Since then he has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy's Rain won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002. Hugo Williams lives in London.