Phil Brown on what Hugo Williams means to him

Back in 2009, Rogue Strands featured Phil Brown's excellent interview with Hugo Williams in the now-disappeared Horizon Review. Seven years on, Brown has published a feature in The Huffington Post in which he describes the curious context of the above-mentioned interview, together with other anecdotes about his experiences with Williams from 2007 to the present day.

Brown's article is a lovely example of how one poet can affect another. This is down to the generosity of its frank tone and revelatory content: we learn a lot about Hugo Williams, but just as much about Phil Brown himself.

Review: Clueless Dogs, by Rhian Edwards

A couple of years ago I reviewed Rhian Edwards' tall-lighthouse pamphlet, Parade the Fib, on Rogue Strands. In fact, you can still read it here. 2012, meanwhile, has seen the publication of her first full collection with Seren Books, titled Clueless Dogs.

Clueless Dogs is an extremely good read. The best poems from the pamphlet run through its spine: Gravy and Sheer are excellent pieces, while Marital Visit is an outstanding poem (the book's worth buying for this one slab of brilliance alone!): a female, lyrically-charged concave mirror of the type of material that Hugo Williams invoked in Billy's Rain. Edwards is terrific at portraying doomed human relationships.

The blurb for Clueless Dogs states that she won the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry 2011-12. Now, I'm not going to get bogged down in the pointless argument of page vs performance. Nevertheless, I do recall sharing a stage with Edwards in London a few years ago. She was compelling, performing her poems such as Marital Visit without recourse to the page. She'd learnt them by heart and was able to engage with the audience by laying open her vulnerability.

I do wonder, however, just whether she is quite so successful with other themes, for reasons I'll try to explain. The very qualities that made the "personal" poems so captivating when performed "live" are also those that pervade her work on other subjects, yet in these cases without the same degree of emotional connection with the audience/reader. Let's take an example: where the circular ending to Marital Visit is devastating in its finality, in other cases the chopping-off of loose ends seems forced, closing instead of opening up beyond the text itself. For instance, here are the final lines from Bridgend:

"...The Samaritans have been lobbying the Vale
for years for a phone box
with a direct dial to a volunteer.
Eventually, the council surrendered and built
the box at the foot of the cliff.

Edwards is offering us an ending that's satisfying at first yet slightly facile on rereading. She's reaching for (and obtaining) an effect on her audience rather than her reader.

Clueless Dogs is not perfect, yet its flaws are intriguing. It shows Edwards reaching out into new themes and exploring how her technique can evolve to deal with them. Let's not forget, however, that it is top-notch when evoking moments, scenes and perspectives on couples that are destined to part. Rhian Edwards has already achieved more than many poets: a new, enlightening view of an old subject. The signs are that there's a lot more to come.

Hugo Williams Interview

There's currently a superb interview with Hugo Williams up at Horizon Review. As an admirer, I've chased down numerous interviews with him, but I firmly believe this stands out above the rest. Phil Brown did his homework, then managed to draw far more out of Williams than is usually the case.

Perhaps the key quote I'd like to highlight is the one that Brown astutely chose to give the interview its title:

"I’m referring to the rich adjectives and the exciting similes that ‘only poets could think of’...people like a few fireworks. I prefer the fireworks to be invisible."

This is obviously something of a posture, bearing in mind that Williams himself even drops a couple of metaphors into the interview, never mind his own poetry. However, I do feel this statement is valid as a challenge of many accepted ways of thinking in contemporary U.K. poetry. It's useful as a point of comparison with many of the poems that Horizon features. By this remark, I don't mean to knock other excellent poets, rather to provoke debate just as Williams does.

I believe he isn't taken seriously enough as a figure at the centre of the U.K. poetry world. Too often dismissed as a posh one-off or as an anecdotal poet of the superficial, his poetry and prose are pushed to the periphery. In fact, Hugo Williams is crucial to our understanding of where we've come from and are heading in poetic terms.