Billy's Rain

Billy's Rain is a book about an affair, told from inside its whole arc, the beginning, the hotel afternoons, the lies that logistics require, the cooling, the end, and the long embarrassing afterlife of longing, and it is written in a style so plain that the artfulness takes a while to register. Hugo Williams is the great deceiver of modern English poetry: the poems look like talk, short, wry, apparently effortless anecdotes a man might tell against himself at a party, and they are built with a dramatist's timing, every line break a raised eyebrow, every flat statement placed where it can do the most damage. The affair the book follows lasted five years, and Williams neither glamorizes nor repents it; the sequence's honesty is of the more uncomfortable kind, about vanity, self deception, the comedy of desire in middle age, and the way a love that could not be public survives afterward only in poems that make it so. The title poem turns on rain in a film, the fake rain called for when the real thing will not perform, which is as good an emblem of the book's method as any: feeling produced by artifice and no less wet for it. Williams, son of the actor Hugh Williams and a TLS columnist for decades, had been refining this conversational instrument through eight previous books; Billy's Rain is where it cut deepest, and it won the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize, the plainest style ever to take the award to that point.