Back from the brink

Hugo Williams’s wryly candid reports from the front lines of sex and family life are a perennial delight. Often timeless, they also frequently bring the styles and music of the 1950s and 1960s back to elegant life. These pleasures can be found once again in Williams’s new book, Lines Off; but this time they’re not unmixed. For, in the five years since his last collection, the poet’s worsening health has led him to undergo a kidney transplant. Now the ultimate subject has presented itself, and has resulted in some piercing testimony.

Of course, it’s much more than testimony: Williams, who characterises writing a poem as being like sealing a roll-up with ‘that final twiddle and lick’, would never produce anything so po-faced. Instead, this highly readable volume turns terrifying experiences into verse that’s sometimes hyperreal, sometimes surreal, and often verges on hallucination. ‘Commonsense’ is transposed, with apparent artlessness, to make no sense at all.