Hugo Williams’s new poems confirm his national-treasure status

Around 1960, I went to work with the literary staff of The Spectator, where I was followed, in a later world, by the poet and diarist Hugo Williams. At this early stage it was possible to feel close to the family that could be inferred from his poems: a mother and a film-star father injured in the war, two brothers, a sister. He was thought, from school onward, to be a member of the jeunesse dorée. His satires could look as if they had issued from the Albany, or other Regency revival buildings. His poems were recognised from the first as elegant and intelligent. Many of them were poems that good manners might write.

It would be silly, of course, to go on as if he were a gentleman rather than a poet, a refugee from a Wilde matinée, but it is nonetheless possible to suppose that his class meant something to his verse, that of a somewhat specialised democrat at times. Let it be said that his activities as a poetry editor, searching for and refusing people’s offerings, were the work of a working man.

I Knew the Bride is a marvellous, memorious collection, once it moves away from the cryptic poems of the early pages. It’s an abstemious collection which is drawn to second world wartime and which sets you down with an aeronautical dump or threat:

A wartime section with sandbags,
gas masks, love letters, lipstick,
an air-raid shelter
with corrugated iron roof,
blackouts, searchlights, adultery,
the King and Queen to the rescue:
blood, sweat and Bovril.
We exit through a luminous arch
set in a mushroom cloud

One of his most heart-rending poems is the elegy for his sister Polly (1950–2004) in memory of what happened when the children were small; Polly was teased and chased in the usual way and it may be that the poem (perfectly judged, not a foot wrong) has a measure of contrition in it:

You fought a five-year war
with that foul thing
which deals in hope and fear,
two against one,
like the brothers who tormented you

The development of the siblings’ relationship gives the structure of the poem; the ragging of the fairytale princess ends in witnessing Polly’s back-parting swept into the flames of a cremation.