Bright River Yonder - Softcover

Rude, innocent and larky, it's also weirdly apt for the seriousness of much of its subject-matter...the best illustration yet of the range and authority of this bizarrely underrated poet. -- Sean O'Brien * Times Literary Supplement * Williams is the poet who first excited me about the inexhaustible possibilities of poetry. He still believes that poetry is about the celebration of the imagination, strange stories and odd phrases that lodge in a fold of the mind and flower one day into something exotic, unnerving and not at all proper. -- David Kennedy * The Wide Skirt *

Bright River Yonder is a baroque Wild West poetry adventure: in which a mysterious silver dollar is passed from hand to hand, from poem to poem. John Hartley Williams's second collection is indescribable and utterly compelling. Its centrepiece, the long poem 'Ephraim Destiny's Perfectly Utter Darkness', won the GBP5000 first prize in the Arvon/Sothebys national poetry competition judged by Basil Bunting, Michael Baldwin, George Barker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrian Mitchell, Peter Redgrove and Stephen Spender.