Collected Poems

In gathering four decades of work, Hugo Williamss 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) and including Writing Home (1985), described by Mick Imlah in the Independent on Sunday as a classic of creative autobiography. The edition is brought up to date with his most recent work: Dock Leaves, a PBS Choice of 1994, and Billys Rain, winner of the 1999 T. S. Eliot Award.

This years best collection of works by a single poet. Intimate, charming and often funny, sometimes wistful, slightly sceptical, full of insight, the poems are a monument to 40 years of talent.Times

In their seemingly artless way, these poems look with candour at feebleness, messy love affairs, squirming memories, and emerge triumphantly, often with a rueful grin. Anthony Thwaite, Sunday Telegraph

Not since Thom Gunns Collected Poems has there been a Collected as startling and poignant as Hugo Williamss Collected Poems. Williams shows us, like no other contemporary poet, what is so strangely undramatic about our personal dramas. Adam Phillips, Observer Books of the Year

Williams is a poet of such intimate charm, such grace and cunning, and such ordinary comical sadness, that he wins your affection and admiration. Hermoine Lee, Guardian