Billy's Rain
A poetry collection tracing a five-year affair and the emotional aftershocks of its ending.
Work Information
It looks at the end of love with both irony and tenderness.
Hugo Williams’s restrained voice turns private experience into exacting poetry.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2000-01-01
- Pages
- 64 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.34 x 1.27 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571200863
- ISBN-10
- 0571200869
- Price
- 1846 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
The fifty poems in Billy's Rain chart the course of a love affair, now ended. Its complications, obsessions, evasions, secret joys and emotional pitfalls are explored with all the subtlety and irony of which Hugo Williams, among contemporary poets, is the acknowledged master. These are brilliant, wry and moving elegies for a love affair.
Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, since when 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 and his last collection, I Knew the Bride , was published in 2014 and shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. In 2004 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Reviews
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The poems seem to form a continuous narrative telling the beginning and end of a love affair. If you took away the line breaks it would be a readable story. In fact I think Williams has previously written "poems" that are continuous blocks and is interested in pushing the edge of prose. Anglicisms, such as silver paper and day return and local London references add obscurity for an American reader and detract from an apparent intent to avoid poetic language. For example Trivia is about the way small things can hurt that remind of a lost love. Francis Thompson wrote "the scent of the rose is bitter to him that loved the rose" but Williams wants to avoid things like roses so he brings in names that sound (I think) prosaic and everyday to an English reader.
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Magnificent poetry. Read it straight through, as a story of the rise and fall of a love affair. The economy of language is truly startling -- Williams tells the whole complex story through little glimpses of his life. He reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop -- if you like her poems, my guess is you'll find Williams a treat.
Related Literary Awards
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 7 (1999) ・Winner