Poetry: In his Dear Me, Peter Ustinov recalls the actor Hugh Williams asking him what he was doing in the next scene of a play they were both appearing in.
"I don't know, I thought I'd do nothing", Ustinov answers. "O no you don't", Williams retorts, "I'm doing nothing in this scene." Like his father, Hugo Williams knows all about stylised languor. Williams is the sunniest of contemporary poets, an inexhaustible fount of cheer. Accusing him of lacking seriousness would be like accusing a kitchen table of having four legs.
A graduate of Ian Hamilton's Review, Williams absorbed Hamilton's admiration for Robert Lowell early in his career. Taking a lead from Life Studies, almost all his best work is concerned with self and family (usually his father), and can be found in the three volumes Writing Home, Self-Portrait with a Slide and Dock Leaves. These embody Williams's chief strengths: poignantly humanised period detail, wry little family narratives and an intermittently amusing line in schoolboy smut in poems such as 'Sex', 'Creative Writing' and 'Toilet'. The last of these may leave readers' feelings on train toilets changed, changed utterly, as Williams's terrible bidet is born:
She leaves her seat,
but I know that she likes me
because the light saying 'Toilet'
has come on, a sign that she is lifting
her skirt, taking down her pants
and peeing all over my face.
His limitations are obvious enough. Even at its best his work is throwaway in spirit and execution. His line-breaks resemble nothing so much as karate chops, and the Williams persona of smarmy lech quickly gets tedious. Nowhere are these faults more obvious than in his 1999 T.S. Eliot prize-winning collection Billy's Rain. Quizzing a grizzled rock star who claimed to have thrown together the soundtrack to a film in half an hour, Barry Norman very sensibly asked him, "That long?" Williams's labours on Billy's Rain belong in the same category of misguided facility. It is among the slightest and weakest work on display here. As one of his soppy-stern schoolmasters might have written on his school report: must try harder.
In 'Man and Superman' Williams's father is not amused by the poet's attempt to tell him a joke: "His lip came out. His jaw went slack. /'It's rather unfunny, isn't it?'" If this small reverse bothered Williams he doesn't say so; perhaps he greeted it with the theatrical lifting of one eyebrow he describes in 'A Start in Life'. As an actor, in other words, he is very much school of Roger Moore: hardly believable as an action hero, but very, very good at doing next to nothing.
Geoffrey Hill recently claimed, to what must have been many people's surprise, that he owes as much to Frankie Howerd as he does to John Donne . As the great man himself might say, titter ye not, but in his recent work Hill has developed a sense of humour bordering on the high camp. How else to explain the suppository jokes in The Triumph of Love and the eulogy to Elton John in Speech! Speech!? After two such carnivalesque books, his new collection, The Orchards of Syon, is comparatively sombre, even mellow.
Written in 72 24-line sections, the book might be described as a Dantean eclogue of the natural world, thronged with familiar ghosts, from Coleridge and Hopkins to Leopardi and Frank O'Hara. The Orchards of Syon is not the kind of book to yield up its secrets on a first reading, but even so its autumnal serenity is often breath-taking:
Clear sky, the snow bare-bright. Loud, peat-sodden,
the swaling Hodder. Of itself
age has no pull. Be easy. With immense
labour he can call it a day.
But Hill is not calling it a day. Philip Larkin published three mature collections in his whole career; The Orchards of Syon is Hill's fourth since 1996. It's a remarkable tally. Hill addicts might want to catch up with a new long poem in a recent issue of Stand, while next year promises a new volume of essays. He can be a trying writer (and he frequently tries my patience) but even at his most rebarbative he is a more compelling figure than just about any other living English poet.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
David Wheatley