Description
Book SynopsisGardens, grotesqueries, historical landscapes, destruction and darkness, all collide in Tony Williams’ explosive new collection
Tony Williams is roaming the earth. The poems in Hawthorn City record the tales we tell ourselves to make a home in the lives we find ourselves living. They are songs to family, to stone and outlawry and refusal, and to the fevered memory which reaches back beyond birth, past early modern witches and shepherds’ songs, past medieval chronicles and Icelandic sagas, to the ancient city-states, homely and hellish, which part of the modern imagination still inhabits. Travelling darker and deeper towards the state which is both origin and grave, this grotesque comedy of a book intensifies into a bizarre, baroque vision of the world and our place in it.
Trade ReviewTony Williams’s Hawthorn City is also a revelation. This powerful collection, Williams’s fourth, takes the reader to a world of Medieval chroniclers, old farmers’ songs, early modern witches, and Icelandic sagas, where the ordinary mingles with the extraordinary.
The poet’s use of tightly metered verse and a language both rich and imaginative takes the reader to strange and expansive landscapes [. . .] Williams’s poetic world reminds me of Borges's intellectual labyrinths and ancient libraries. His erudition is never dense or academic but, rather, always unusual, an adventure of the spirit from which the reader can always leave surprised and enriched.
-- Leo Boix * Magma Poetry *
