John Hartley-Williams's Books

Blues

By: John Hartley Williams

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Subversive and satirical, inventive, wry and unconventional, John Hartley Williams has long been celebrated for his maverick sensibility, for his outsider's take on the way we live our lives. In Blues, his eighth collection, he focuses with new directness on the turmoil of Germany and Eastern Europe, and writes eloquently about being English, and staying English, in a continental climate, through all the upheavals of the last fifteen years. Alert to the intricacies and ironies of the language, to the musculature of politics and passion, these poems are chronicles of change, wired to the energies of jazz and science fiction, yet the under-song is a threnody for the loss of a kind of Englishness - voiced powerfully in a moving elegy for the poet Ken Smith. While there is no diminishing of his comic brio, no dulling of his incisive, questioning intelligence, Blues finds John Hartley Williams taking on subjects of new depth and complexity - while maintaining his characteristic lightness of touch, imagination and profound originality.

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Random House

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ISBN 10

1407092634

ISBN 13

9781407092638

Spending Time With Walter

By: John Hartley Williams

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Spending Time With Walter

By: John Hartley Williams

The long poem at the centre of John Hartley Williams' new collection is a dramatic monologue narrated by a laconic, possibly lamed, forest dweller, a lowly crewmember on a barge travelling an unnamed waterway. Some of his remarks are addressed to his talisman, the shrunken head of an African tribesman. The barge carries a sinister cargo and its captain has a preference for sadistic sex. Other poems in the book undertake journeys - to Northern Cyprus, China, medieval France, Florida - but like 'The Barge' they're not exactly travel poems, more poems which travel. Welcome to the unsettling world of John Hartley Williams, whose restless, inexhaustible imagination, originality and maverick humour have enlivened contemporary poetry for years. Paranoid, erotic, disturbed and disturbing, these are bulletins from a dislocated, parallel world that excites, entertains and terrifies - and often feels more real to us than our own.

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Page Count

104

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

1448113717

ISBN 13

9781448113712

Death Comes for the Poets

By: Matthew Sweeney,John Hartley-Williams

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Death Comes for the Poets

By: Matthew Sweeney,John Hartley-Williams

The cream of Britain's poets are getting murdered. Victor Priest takes on two assistants to help investigate. In a hilarious and dramatic denoument the criminal is discovered. Priest hires two assistants to help track the criminal. Despite their unconventional and hilarious behaviour they bring the case to a dramatic conclusion.

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Page Count

398

Publisher

Muswell Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0956892078

ISBN 13

9780956892072

Café des Artistes

By: John Hartley Williams

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Café des Artistes

By: John Hartley Williams

Welcome to the Café des Artistes. Your host, the owner, bartender, master of ceremonies and only other guest: John Hartley Williams. Here you will be entertained and diverted - by bizarre stories of mapless roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones of Bonehenge; by a spooked version of Rimbaud's 'La Bateau Ivre'; by encounters with Malcolm Lowry, the floating dead, the 'old men behind the waterfall' and the knitted poet; by poems about donkey jackets and dancing with donkeys, and a one-sided conversation with a decidedly un-Romantic polar bear two doors down from Dove Cottage. Long celebrated for his ranging, restless imagination, his baroque, elliptical narratives, his manic humour and maverick stance, Williams returns with another invitation to join him for a jug or two of wine in his out-of-kilter universe: a world that is both strange, and strangely familiar. Welcome to the Café des Artistes!

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Random House

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ISBN 10

140907627X

ISBN 13

9781409076278

Mystery In Spiderville

By: John Hartley Williams

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Mystery In Spiderville

By: John Hartley Williams

Alongside the names of James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner we must now add that of John Hartley Williams - though Mystery in Spiderville is no run-of-the-mill hard-boiled thriller. The décor is by Dali, the plot is a mixture of Breton and Burroughs, and the main character - the protean and unkillable Spider Rembrandt - has six toes, sleeps in a grave and dreams of congress with the pert and playful Reedy Buttons. Sucked into the vortex of Spider's philandering mind is a narrator - sometimes Spider's adversary, sometimes his victim - who lies upon a bed brooding on the absence of a nameless, brown-haired woman. He, too, is protean: full of passionate longings and homicidal tendencies. A surrealist film-noir that blends the forensic with the erotic, the seedy penny-dreadful and the lyric prose-poem, Mystery in Spiderville is one of the strangest, strongest and most arresting fictional debuts in years.

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