Williams is a poet who always surprises me through the course of reading a selection of his poems, rather like going through a packet of Revels: you never quite know what the filling is going to be until you bite into it. In just 54 pages, Williams provides sketches of pub literati (‘Good Companions’; ‘The poets of the public bar’), poet ghosts (‘Waiting with Beckett’; ‘Walking with Bukowski’), tongue-in-cheek poetic pastiche (‘Runcorn East’ – subtitled with apologies to Edward Thomas; the Hughesian ‘Crow’), Carrollish polemic (‘Dr. Strangelove & The New Model Triad’), beguiling vignettes (‘An Old Man Walks Home’), quirky studies of the mundane (‘Haircut’; ‘Christmas Shopping’), picturesque travelogue (‘On Attending the Venice Biennale’; ‘On the Felderherrenhalle Steps’; ‘Iron Curtain’), as well as his trademark native leg-pulling (‘Report on ‘Welsh Grammar’’) and Austrian miniatures (‘Simon Rattle Conducts’; ‘Greilenstein Castle’) – the poet resides in Vienna. The fillings are mostly honeycomb and there are very few, if any, orange or coconuts among them (ok, metaphor over).

Williams is a particularly likeable Welsh-hailed poet, in that he doesn’t take his sense of nationality too seriously (unlike other modern day bards from the valleys one might think of), possibly helped by living at a distance in Austria and no doubt gaining a more objective view
of his native land and inhabitants as, say, James Joyce did of Ireland while living in Switzerland et al.

I recommend Genteel Messages wholeheartedly for any poetry reader who wishes for some rewarding and colourful respite from the dreary introspection of much of today’s British ‘poetry scene’ - and from my favourite ex-pat poet, Gwilym Williams.

Alan Morrison - (The RECUSANT)

In the Park
On the grass someone is sleeping;
I think it’s a woman.
I think she’s asleep
under that green plastic sheet
directly in front of that bench
by the drinking fountain; supermarket
bags arranged on the seat.

But I don’t want to wake her and ask her.

No doubt they contain the usual things;
old magazines, broken biros, newspaper,
a curl of orange peel, two or three cans
of beer, a scattering of bent or broken
cigarettes, smelly clothes, tangled string;-
you know the sort of thing.

Nearby a man and some children play;
wrestling on a heap of bouncy blocks.

Another man is pushing a bike away.