“A moving collection of work from a great unsung poet.”
“This is a moving collection of work from a great unsung poet”
This is a valuable, long-awaited book that brings together, comprehensively, all of the early work of Nicholas Snowdon Willey. Nick Willey possessed a unique and poetic voice, one that was recognised early in life; his first book of poems, The Green Tunnel, was published before he was twenty. His work was regularly featured published in the in the literary magazine Encounter, and he was one of The Children of Alibion in Michael Horowitz’s epoch-defining Penguin collection. Yet Nick remained an elusive figure, and it is hard to say why he did not reach a wider audience, except that he was a private poet in a world where poetry has increasingly become a public act. Nick was a poet of inner space and he chronicled intensely an inner life, with its griefs and personal turmoil, as well as its flashes of joy; where haunting simplicity combines with complex rhythm and thought. These are poems to read and reread.
This collection takes us up to the mid-seventies, but Nick never stopped writing and there remains an equally formidable body of poems that were published in the ensuing years. Joss Wynne Evans and Light Touch publishers are owed a debt of gratitude for producing a book that is a celebration and a true reflection of Nick Willey’s work and for bringing these poems together under one roof. And for giving new readers a chance to discover an individual and cherishable poet who sailed for too long under the radar.
Dominic Power
“Relentless Honesty”
This is a strong, consistent, and very moving volume of poetry.
It relies on a limited stock of elemental vocabulary and rhymes
which are artfully controlled to express its ideas and emotions in a
simple and direct way. (Blake’s Songs of Innocence come to mind)
They examine time and tense and the whirlwind sense of past/present/and future all melting together—the infuriating question of where existence starts and stops. The lines speak for themselves:
“what is this flurry that passes through me and times my passing”
and “He wanders there, someone I will be”
and a wonderful description of the vulnerable self as:
“this hazard envelope of speed”.
Relentless honesty. A privilege to read.
PJW
” I feel so grateful to have discovered the poetry of Nicholas Willey.”
These are remarkable poems, deeply personal and at the same time profoundly philosophical. They are like tapestries woven out of contrasting images from nature – water and air, light and darkness, spring and autumn – rhyming with the same unforced, natural fluidity as the elements he describes. Within these lucid structures he poses very serious questions about human experience: how perception, passion, reason and reality interconnect, both in life and in art:
“How can I teach myself what mind and heart
Must thread together thoughtless from the start?”
(The Walls of Logos)
These poems deserve to be read and re-read, as layers of meaning reveal themselves and richly reward us.
Jenny Richardson
