Catching a sudden look of defiance from his granddaughter inspires Hugo Williams to take up his pen and write this deeply moving new collection of poetry - the first since I Knew the Bride (2014), shortlisted...

'I believe I shall be writing home about this trip for the rest of my life... years from now, still recollecting, like an old white hunter, shadowy images to an empty fireplace, far into the night...'All...

Hugo Williams's new collection summons the poet's past selves in order of appearance, as in an autobiography, showing in poems as clear as rock pools that the plain truth is only as plain as the props...

Hugo Williams is rightly cherished for his inimitable fusion of autobiography and irony, and a technical glide that allows his writing to 'slip back to the past as effortlessly as a dreamer' (The Times)....

'A hilarious book of bad times, bedtimes and benders. It is a kind of cool parody of On the Road.' New StatesmanNo Particular Place to Go (first published in 1981) relates Hugo Williams's journey across...

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...

In 1988 Hugo Williams began to pen his 'Freelance' column for the Times Literary Supplement: a window that allowed him to exhibit the full panoply of his gifts as travel writer, literary portraitist,...

The art of portraiture in poetry is traceable from the Latin poets and Chaucer via Goldsmith, Wordsworth and Browning, to the modern era of Rimbaud, Cavafy, Auden, Lowell and Hofmann. Poetry is an art...

In these poems, Hugo Williams's subjects include the stings inflicted by school, family and love-life, and the exquisite (if qualified) solace afforded by their contemplation.

Dear Room is a worthy successor to Billy's Rain (1999), whose preoccupations and occasions it continues and ramifies, charting the 'angles, signals, orders, murmurs, sighs' of love, separation and loss....

'He's a poet of such intimate charm, such grace and cunning, and such ordinary comic sadness, that he wins your affection and admiration.' Hermione Lee, GuardianFast Music refers as much to the fast dance...