'Lines off' is a term used for lines spoken from the wings of a theatre, or off-camera in a film. It was while Hugo Williams was out of circulation following transplant surgery that he wrote the poems for this new collection - the first since I Knew the Bride (2014), shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. From youthful days 'upside down in the Crazy Room, / rising and falling on the Haunted Swing', he takes us to distant countries, both actual and metaphorical; participates in the 'mortal pantomime' of the hospital ward with humorous frankness; and offers a percipient account of growing older, with all its attendant doubts and disturbances. 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'.

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. Freelancing is a collection of these TLS columns that finds Williams variously in Sarajevo, Central America, Jerusalem, Skyros, Portugal and Norwich. In the course of events he sees his Selected Poems published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau and he crashes his motorbike. He reads and teaches, as most poets do, but also strolls through Paris dressed as Marlene Dietrich, encounters some of the great and good, and explores his personal history. His account of these adventures, reflections and discoveries is elegantly turned, frequently hilarious, and at times surprisingly poignant.

'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

"'I believe I shall be writing home about this trip for the rest of my life... years from now, still recollecting, like an old white hunter, shadowy images to an empty fireplace, far into the night...'"

"All the Time in the World," a first work of prose by the poet Hugo Williams, was originally published in 1966 and commemorates Williams' effort at age 21 to 'travel the world': the Middle East, India, South-East Asia, Japan and Australia. Rich with striking and vivid perceptions of people and places and perilous forms of transport, the account also finds Williams acquiring precious life-experience, even as the setting moves from the self-evident 'poem' of India's landscape to barren, petrified Northern Australia. In Calcutta Williams looks up the great Satyajit Ray through the telephone book. In Thailand he meets a girl at a dance-hall, moves into her sunny flat, contemplates staying. But to England he will return, albeit by the most unexpectedly arduous leg of his amazing journey.

Sir John Betjeman (1906-84) was born in Highgate, the son of a manufacturer of Dutch descent. His poetry enjoyed immense popularity, as did his personality, and his knighthood in 1969 and appointment as Poet Laureate in 1972 were universally welcomed. Other volumes in this series: Auden, Eliot, Plath, Hughes and Yeats.

In gathering four decades of work, Hugo Williams's 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 Billy's Rain, winner of the 1999 T. S. Eliot Award. 'This year's 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 Gunn's Collected Poems has there been a Collected as startling and poignant as Hugo Williams's 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 'William's 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

Hugo Williams's new collection summons the poet's past selves in order of appearance, as in an autobiography, showing in poems as clear as rock pools that the plain truth is only as plain as the props and make-up needed to stage it. Childhood and school time offer up the amateur theatricals of themselves, in poems of vertiginous retrospect; other poems itemize the professional selves of the poet's actor-father Hugh Williams (by now as familiar and frequently depicted as Cezanne's mountain), while the narrator - 'waiting to step into my father's shoes as myself' - teases out the paradoxes of identity and inheritance After this searching portraiture of the poet's parents, the chronology opens onto the broad secular thoroughfares of adulthood, including a limpid arrangement of pillow poems which tell the same erotic bedtime story in twelve different ways. Other poems strike out decisively along roads not taken: meticulous misremembering, sinister and fecklessly unfinished narratives about the parallel lives of desire, re-enacting lost futures and accommodating the irrepressible past as it keeps bouncing back onstage. In these fastidious and sardonic investigations of the fault-line between voice and projection, we admire once more the droll fearlessness, the art of candour as practised by Hugo Williams in this, his tenth collection of poems.

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. With grave good humour, ruefully exact timing and a scruple reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, these poems register the goodbye look of things, and ponder the difference between a good memory and an inability to forget. By turns candid, caustic and drastically self-accusing, the many tenses and afterlives of desire are parsed - in sawn-off monologues, short stories in verse, thumbnail dramas, splintery photographs. In poem after poem Hugo Williams joins a sense of things missed and missing to a redemptive act of imaginative capture, and Dear Room uncovers an ethics of the present, reminding us in the words of Philip Larkin that 'days are where we live'.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature. Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) was born in Highgate, the son of a manufacturer of Dutch descent. After university he joined the staff of the Architectural Review, thereafter working as a journalist and, during the Second World War, for various government departments. His first book of poems was Mount Zion (1931), followed by numerous collections, notably A Few Late Chrysanthemeumns (1954). His poetry enjoyed immense popularity, as did his personality, and his knighthood in 1969 and appointment as Poet Laureate in 1972 were almost universally welcomed.

Hugo Williams is rightly cherished for his inimitable fusion of autobiography and irony, and a technical glide that allows his writing to 'slip back to the past as effortlessly as a dreamer' (The Times). I Knew the Bride is Williams' eleventh collection of poems, and his first since West End Final was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes for poetry in 2009. This new volume bears - and lays bare - those qualities that have become so characteristic of his work: his unflinching survey of his childhood and adult life alike, alighting on moments of vivacity from his upbringing in a theatrical family in the 1940s and 50s (the title poem a touching tribute to his late sister) through to the romantic peaks and pains of his adult years. Straight-talking, self-deprecating and funny, these recklessly accountable inspections are set against a Williams-esk miscellany of day-to-day backdrops that readers have come to treasure: of record collections, kitchen sinks, shopping bicycles, hotels, bedrooms. But I Knew the Bride is no mere rehearsal of old lives lived; 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.

In these poems, deadpan comedy and a relish for the outrageous and the bizarre often carry an emotional charge. Subjects include the stings inflicted by school, family and love-life.

Title: Translations: Hugo-Be ranger-Mickiewicz. By William James Linton.]Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century's most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of works the collection also includes song-books, comedy, and works of satire. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Hugo, Victor; Linton, William James; null 8 . 011652.m.13.(3.)

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Richard Hugo was, in James Wright's words, "a great poet, true to our difficult life." Making Certain It Goes On brings together, as Hugo wished, the poems published in book form during his lifetime, together with the new poems he wrote in his last years. It is the definitive collection of a major American poet's enduring work.

"The poetry of Richard Hugo is one of the most profound and moving documents that our period of American literature has produced. Hugo's uncompromising imagination, his powerful concern with the world of nature and of people, combined with his absolute dedication to the craft of poetry, result in writing which, at its best, lifts us into a realm where everything is of consequence, which we always knew it was, and never found the means to say it."—James Dickey

"His collected poems show Hugo turning toward a calm peace that would mark his best work. . . . If we had not noticed before that his great gift was the elegy, we see it now. . . . Richard Hugo died in 1982. He did not doubt that his work would go on. It will."—Dave Smith, New York Times Book Review