Fast Music

'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, Guardian Fast Music refers as much to the fast dance music that caused Williams to run round the room on the furniture aged three as to the speed of life, thought and to poetry itself, which works harder and faster than ordinary speech. In a poem about his typewriter, the 'undiscovered islands' are the many and various extraordinary subjects which rise out of the sea of his daily life, to be caught between the rollers of his beloved Adler Gabriele: 'Words returning with a bang and a bell to the left-hand margin, pausing for a moment to reflect on the scene.' Fast Music ranges from wide-eyed school days to a full-blown sequence of love sonnets, to an ode to Brighton's West Pier and the inevitable helter-skelter of fate.

Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, since when he has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy's Rain won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002 and his last collection, I Knew the Bride, was published in 2014 and shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. In 2004 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.