Speckled with Ice and Salt

Lines Off, Hugo Williams, Faber & Faber, 2019, £14.99 (hardcover)

It is perhaps impossible to write about the poems of Hugo Williams without making the same points that everyone does. As is often noted, in the warm reviews and prize citations which greet his works, he writes about his family, and particularly his parents; he is blessed with an easy style, which is often compared to that of a lyricist or an actor; this stylistic ease is bought in part by a sense of humour, a wry handling of the line and the line break; and he has been unwell, and his time on the hospital ward or undergoing dialysis has been the subject for frank and often very moving poems. Williams himself invites this kind of biographical reading, as his poems are undeniably intimate, while his personality is known to readers of the TLS due to his regular ‘Freelance’ column. Faced with this poet who repeats his themes, then, the critics also repeat their themes, which leaves a challenge. How might one say something new and different about him and his work?

Williams’s poems follow the logic of accretion, as each return to familiar ground (the pun is deliberate) gives new depth to the old episodes, told or thought-through once again. His new collection, Lines Off, returns to familiar themes and topics, and this is precisely the point. Williams was diagnosed with kidney disease in 2011, and in the following years underwent dialysis three times a week. This repetitive treatment is evoked in a cycle called ‘Dialysis Days’, published in his previous collection, I Knew the Bride (2014). The first poem in the cycle begins:

Every other day I follow the route of the Midland Railway to where it cuts through St Pancras Old Church Cemetery.

The direct tone hides the rhetorical tricks. Here, personification turns into metaphor as the speaker is first a man on his way to hospital then a train following the train lines. There is then, of course, the hint of death in the cemetery, and now we’ve moved from one British institution to another. You can’t think about churchyards in English poetry without thinking about Thomas Gray – ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave’ – and Gray isn’t the only other poet here, as later in the poem Williams recalls that Thomas Hardy used to work removing bodies at this cemetery.

It’s always unexpected but once you start close reading a Williams poem it’s tempting not to stop; and this going on, of course, is really his theme. He’s the train passing through the cemetery but he is going on, and he returns to this journey through these locations in his new collection. Here, the poem ‘Dialysis Days’ begins with the wry acknowledgement that ‘For the first time in my life/ I have a regular job to go to’, and explains:

All I have to do is get myself to the workplace on time and roll up a blood-stained sleeve. I grab a sandwich at the Angel Pret, then take the little 214 down Pentonville to St Pancras Old Church Cemetery with its workhouse out of Oliver Twist.

The same, but different; not Hardy but Dickens; not a train but a bus; and this not really a job at all, of course, but an appointment at the hospital for treatment. As ever, there’s the distinctive fondness for puns (the angel ready to welcome him to heaven is also the Islington branch of Pret A Manger…), but the stanza culminates in a spectacle of vulnerability:

My job is holding out my hand to a machine, palm up, like a beggar, and doing my best not to move.

This is a haunting image, of supplication to a machine.

But his hospital treatment is working here as something more than simply a theme. Instead, the treatment itself gives a structure to the poems. It is an obvious point to make, but dialysis is not only an appointment at the hospital. It is also of course a kind of repetition with change, as impurities are cleared from the blood, and it suggests a way of thinking about personhood, and the limits of the human, for in dialysis a machine takes on a bodily function, that of the kidneys. In all this Williams is engaged in what we might think of as a kind of dialysis poetics: he is making poetry from dialysis; and he is making poetry like dialysis. ‘Needles have the sudden beauty / of a first line’ he writes in the first line of an earlier poem.

Repetition with change, and the recycling of personal material into something new – this is all beginning to sound like the high poetic Modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, two poets who look on the surface nothing at all like Williams. But it is worth at least drawing out the comparison a little, as it suggests that there is something slippery at play in William’s handling of the personal. To define poetic Modernism, everybody always quotes the same bit from T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’. This is taken as an ideal of Modernist poetry: impersonal, cold, inhuman. But they less often quote the line which follows, which reveals that Eliot was at least partly joking: ‘But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things’.

It’s this wryly conscious handing of the personal which makes Williams, oddly, into one of the true heirs of Eliot. And once we’re thinking about heirs and ancestors, we’re firmly back in Williams country. Eliot again, from the same essay: ‘the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’. This might have been written about Williams, for his poems famously return to his ancestors, and assert their vigour. Williams’s mother was the model and actress Margaret Vyner; his father was the actor Hugh Williams; and poems about them dominate Williams’s most celebrated collection, West End Final (2009). In one, he takes his father’s old fur-lined coat to be

repaired; in another, he watches films starring his father. This latter poem’s title is ‘Heavy Father’, which is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In the play, Montagu pictures the lovesick Romeo – ‘Away from light steals home my heavy son’ – but Williams turns this inside out as the son is changed to the father.

In the new collection, something sharpens in the poems about his father; or perhaps that which was implicit is brought just slightly into focus. These are really poems not about his father but the father’s absence. In ‘Teatime 1945’ he describes his father’s return from the war:

His officer’s uniform and hair outranked my pale blue siren-suit and matinee jacket. His parting stood like a feather in his cap, as he advanced on my domain.

Again, close reading is irresistible: the dressing up, of actors and soldiers; the pun on parting and advancing; and the detail given to all the attributes of the bodies but not to the bodies themselves combine into a portrait of distance.

Williams has built his parents – their stories, their lives, their style – into a kind of private mythology. This is not personal, or not simply so. Somewhere at the heart of these fine and elegant poems which appear so lightly intimate is an unsettled, unsettling idea about separation and absence. Much is gained here by humour, by the distinctively light touch. One poem in the new collection, called ‘My War’, begins ‘Not my mother…’, while the second stanza begins, ‘Not my father…’, and here is a joke about our own expectation of Williams as that poet who only writes about his parents. They’re present, of course; that’s the joke; but they’re also just to the side, in the wings, and it’s not for nothing that this collection’s title is Lines Off, as if heard from off-stage. This genteel, polished poet might, viewed in a certain light, let us look back upon the old high Modernist games about

selfhood, personality, the author. ‘All that is personal soon rots: it must be packed in ice or salt’ declared W. B. Yeats, and Williams’s new collection is speckled with exactly that ice and salt, preserving the gestures and feelings of a lost age while keeping it from being merely memoir.