Hugo Williams Book order

'A classic of creative autobiography,' Mick Imlah

'Lines off' is a term used for lines spoken from the wings of a theatre, or off-camera in a film. Autobiographical, psychological, remedial, Lines Off heralds the return of this acclaimed poet, back to the stage of the page, offering us 'the performance of a lifetime'.

instead it takes the author and his readers into startling new terrain in a series of brave, painful and profoundly moving poems 'From the Dialysis Ward', in which the author records his own ongoing hospital treatment with a fearless vulnerability that makes this collection of poems a courageous and inspiring read.

'A hilarious book of bad times, bedtimes and benders. It is a kind of cool parody of On the Road.' New Statesman No Particular Place to Go (first published in 1981) relates Hugo Williams's journey across the USA on a three-month poetry-reading tour wherein he also hoped to discover some of the America he had imagined for so long on the strength of its all-consuming popular culture. 'No Particular Place to Go isn't a book that you'd take on a visitor's itinerary of the States . . . But the journey it describes is a potent one . . . It offered a poet's eye on modern culture, a cool, sideways perspective on its consumers and an enviable traveller's voice - not just unafraid of meeting the locals but positively keen to jump in and grab whatever was on offer.' John Walsh, Independent

At 21, the author embarks on a transformative journey across the Middle East, India, South-East Asia, Japan, and Australia. The narrative captures vivid perceptions of diverse cultures and landscapes, alongside the challenges of perilous travel. Through these experiences, the author gains invaluable life lessons, offering readers a unique glimpse into the adventures and insights that shape personal growth and understanding of the world.

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, working poet, and all-round chronicler of the curious existence of the contemporary writer.

Summons the poet's past selves in order of appearance, as in an autobiography. This title includes childhood and school time that offer up the amateur theatricals of themselves, in poems of vertiginous retrospect; and other poems itemize the professional selves of the poet's actor-father Hugh Williams.

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.

In gathering four decades of work, Hugo Williams' Collected Poems brings back into print a vast body of material long since unavailable - from his 1965 debut Symptoms of Loss, to Self-portrait with a Slide (1990). This edition also includes Dock Leaves.

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 of which Hugo Williams, among contemporary poets, is the acknowledged master. These are brilliant, wry and moving elegies for a love affair.