Musical Chairs
Hugo Williams, Lines Off
Faber, 80pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780571349753
reviewed by GE Stevens
There’s an element of musical chairs to Lines Off, HugoWilliams’ first collection since I Knew the Bride in 2014. Whilst the music plays, Williams remembers the ‘faded photo strips’ of his past with characteristic swagger and self-effacing humour. He takes us back to his school coming out ball, ‘We were drinking and driving, barely surviving’; he takes us to Paris to fall for Tara Browne who ‘went out into the night, / dancing your crazy doodle-step/on the pedals of your Lotus Elan’; he takes us to the Savoy Hotel in Wartime and encourages us to scoff at the maitre d’ who replies ‘Good, good, excellent, splendid. . .’ to every awful thing, and he takes us to parties where he and his other ‘party casuals’ turned up ‘equipped with little more / than a driving license and a cigarette lighter / for our life in films’.
But the party, the music, cannot go on forever. Williams wrote Lines Off following severe kidney failure and transplant surgery and the majority of the collection deals with his frustration as he grapples with illness, homesickness and uncertainty. It is a very different Williams to the one we are used to; his typical buoyancy is tempered with resignation, his charm and wink with shrugs and mumbling. ‘Night Shift’, a worthy nod to Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, is one of the more despairing and lonely poems of the collection: ‘Well, shepherd, well / the golden age is gone’ Williams confides to his empty hospital room, ‘and I sit mumbling here.’ The syntax is simple, the words small and fatigued: ‘say no to me this once and I’ll be good’ he implores his own death like a small boy to his school master. Williams is facing his own mortality head-on, his own ‘black grease of fear’ sliding by. Soon, perhaps very soon, there will be no chairs left at all.
Yet amid this despair, where things ‘don’t light up as they used to’, Williams’ deft touch with detail and humour extend the poems far beyond his private anguish. ‘For the first time in my life / I have a regular job to go to’ he writes in ‘Dialysis Days’. The ‘job’, of course, is his own sickness, which will require him to ‘turn up’ and be tethered ‘to a machine, palm up, like a beggar.’ In ‘The Check- Up’, Williams’s doctor tells the student nurse ‘Oh yes, we thought he was a goner’ and then proceeds to get out a camera to take ‘a picture of me alive. / The student poses smiling with the undead / a willing witness to the miracle.’ You’d be hard pushed not to break a smile in these moments where, despite his acute suffering, Williams somehow manages to find and celebrate the daft wonder of being alive.
Williams is a master at finding the one detail that illuminates a whole person or a whole scene and his best poems vibrate around these lines. For example, in ‘Leaking Doctor’, when the doctor comes to give the bad news that he may need to have surgery, Williams does not describe the doctor or what he says but instead fixates on his doctor’s leaking coffee cup, ‘Coffee rings chase one another / round my assessment form’. This is the only image he gives us and it is all we need to feel part of that room, part of not really hearing or facing up to the prognosis.
Where Lines Off lands less well is when Williams moves further away from the detail of his own experience. In particular, there’s something aerated and vague about poems ‘Skyros’ which deals with the flight of a female and male bird, where ‘the free-wheeling male / performs figure-eights / on up-draughts of warm air.’ and ‘Distant Grounds’ which remembers a past love ‘seeing only her face, her arms, her neck / the leisurely flow of her hips /rising and falling on the swell.’ These poems don’t sound like they have passed through Williams in the same way, they don’t feel like they have undergone his edit for humanity, detail, straight-talking.
Lines Off is also an elegy to writing; after reading it, you get the impression that the very act of writing, its power to affirm, comfort and duplicate experience, has literally saved Williams’ life. In ‘Night Watch’, it is his books, not loved ones, that ‘keep watch on me’. They are physically there with him, they always bother turning up. In this sense, this collection is the most autobiographical we have seen Williams, not because the majority of the poems are about (albeit obliquely) his own sickness, but because the poems talk to themselves, they double up on themselves and point to him, the writer, the act of writing. In ‘Pepys Island’, he describes his South Atlantic voyage to the island as a young man, but despite him remembering it all ‘as if it were yesterday’, nobody since can verify the island existing: ‘The only proof of its existence / lies in the pages of my log // which I cling to as I write’. He, his writing, is his own self-evidence.
At the start of Lines Off, Williams had to remember in order to travel. At the end of the collection, in ‘St Pancras Old Church and Hospital’, he is outside again, walking around the graveyard of his illness and looking in. ‘Now here I am’ he affirms, ‘a new man, / not quite myself perhaps, / yet able to ramble occasionally.’ The illness has changed him, the sashay of Billy’s Rain a distant, younger past. This is a quiet, off-centre production, and it is all the more brave for it. Williams takes us to the edges of his illness, the self-sorry mornings, the battered servile arm with all its woes and tears, the icy fear of consultations. And although Williams resists us the closure of a full recovery as he writes, ‘the light has changed / and the air feels colder now’ in ‘The Half-Open Door’, he no longer has to spend every day ‘lying with a machine’ on the Dialysis ward. At last, there is more to live for than the ‘collecting of bits of fluff/ from hospital blankets’. Williams can go home now. He can walk about. He can hear the birds he once watched from his bed. It is a changed music of course, tuned to a man less sure of himself and more sure of his ending. But perhaps it will be the simple joys now reclaimed through recovery that will feed Williams’ new music. I myself am excited to hear his next rambling song.
But the party, the music, cannot go on forever. Williams wrote Lines Off following severe kidney failure and transplant surgery and the majority of the collection deals with his frustration as he grapples with illness, homesickness and uncertainty. It is a very different Williams to the one we are used to; his typical buoyancy is tempered with resignation, his charm and wink with shrugs and mumbling. ‘Night Shift’, a worthy nod to Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, is one of the more despairing and lonely poems of the collection: ‘Well, shepherd, well / the golden age is gone’ Williams confides to his empty hospital room, ‘and I sit mumbling here.’ The syntax is simple, the words small and fatigued: ‘say no to me this once and I’ll be good’ he implores his own death like a small boy to his school master. Williams is facing his own mortality head-on, his own ‘black grease of fear’ sliding by. Soon, perhaps very soon, there will be no chairs left at all.
Yet amid this despair, where things ‘don’t light up as they used to’, Williams’ deft touch with detail and humour extend the poems far beyond his private anguish. ‘For the first time in my life / I have a regular job to go to’ he writes in ‘Dialysis Days’. The ‘job’, of course, is his own sickness, which will require him to ‘turn up’ and be tethered ‘to a machine, palm up, like a beggar.’ In ‘The Check- Up’, Williams’s doctor tells the student nurse ‘Oh yes, we thought he was a goner’ and then proceeds to get out a camera to take ‘a picture of me alive. / The student poses smiling with the undead / a willing witness to the miracle.’ You’d be hard pushed not to break a smile in these moments where, despite his acute suffering, Williams somehow manages to find and celebrate the daft wonder of being alive.
Williams is a master at finding the one detail that illuminates a whole person or a whole scene and his best poems vibrate around these lines. For example, in ‘Leaking Doctor’, when the doctor comes to give the bad news that he may need to have surgery, Williams does not describe the doctor or what he says but instead fixates on his doctor’s leaking coffee cup, ‘Coffee rings chase one another / round my assessment form’. This is the only image he gives us and it is all we need to feel part of that room, part of not really hearing or facing up to the prognosis.
Where Lines Off lands less well is when Williams moves further away from the detail of his own experience. In particular, there’s something aerated and vague about poems ‘Skyros’ which deals with the flight of a female and male bird, where ‘the free-wheeling male / performs figure-eights / on up-draughts of warm air.’ and ‘Distant Grounds’ which remembers a past love ‘seeing only her face, her arms, her neck / the leisurely flow of her hips /rising and falling on the swell.’ These poems don’t sound like they have passed through Williams in the same way, they don’t feel like they have undergone his edit for humanity, detail, straight-talking.
Lines Off is also an elegy to writing; after reading it, you get the impression that the very act of writing, its power to affirm, comfort and duplicate experience, has literally saved Williams’ life. In ‘Night Watch’, it is his books, not loved ones, that ‘keep watch on me’. They are physically there with him, they always bother turning up. In this sense, this collection is the most autobiographical we have seen Williams, not because the majority of the poems are about (albeit obliquely) his own sickness, but because the poems talk to themselves, they double up on themselves and point to him, the writer, the act of writing. In ‘Pepys Island’, he describes his South Atlantic voyage to the island as a young man, but despite him remembering it all ‘as if it were yesterday’, nobody since can verify the island existing: ‘The only proof of its existence / lies in the pages of my log // which I cling to as I write’. He, his writing, is his own self-evidence.
At the start of Lines Off, Williams had to remember in order to travel. At the end of the collection, in ‘St Pancras Old Church and Hospital’, he is outside again, walking around the graveyard of his illness and looking in. ‘Now here I am’ he affirms, ‘a new man, / not quite myself perhaps, / yet able to ramble occasionally.’ The illness has changed him, the sashay of Billy’s Rain a distant, younger past. This is a quiet, off-centre production, and it is all the more brave for it. Williams takes us to the edges of his illness, the self-sorry mornings, the battered servile arm with all its woes and tears, the icy fear of consultations. And although Williams resists us the closure of a full recovery as he writes, ‘the light has changed / and the air feels colder now’ in ‘The Half-Open Door’, he no longer has to spend every day ‘lying with a machine’ on the Dialysis ward. At last, there is more to live for than the ‘collecting of bits of fluff/ from hospital blankets’. Williams can go home now. He can walk about. He can hear the birds he once watched from his bed. It is a changed music of course, tuned to a man less sure of himself and more sure of his ending. But perhaps it will be the simple joys now reclaimed through recovery that will feed Williams’ new music. I myself am excited to hear his next rambling song.