Reading Lesson in the Lifers' Wing

 (Peterloo Press) 

ISBN 978-1-904324-55-3

 

The Model Shop (Waterloo Press)

ISBN 978-1-906742-35-5

Reviewers' comments:

‘A strong, original voice…so real and vivid…very clever and profound.’

-Patricia McCarthy ‘Agenda’.

‘F.J.Williams has a good eye on social life and where poetry might lie…All these poems work well...I particularly admire ‘White Mulberry’ and ‘The Wigwam speech’

-David Caddy, ‘Tears in the Fence’.

 

My favourite is ‘The Model Shop’ by F.J. Williams: ‘A packet of bus stops, the instant ivy/And the smell of toyshop varnish.’ Wonderful.

-Rachel Playforth  in ‘Poetry Magazines’, Poetry Library, South Bank Centre.

 

‘Some lovely things here. Superb observations.’

-Robert Minhinnick ‘Poetry Wales’

 

‘Here is the power of fluency and striking phrase.’

            -Pennine Platform

 

 

                 The Stone Room

 

The Web wars have heated up again

With silos, platform review and search panes

Puffed to the size of an orange.

 

A little googling and you reach the Stone Room

Wilderness, weighty discovery,

The tranquillised hammer-rendered rocks.

 

There's the extinction at Zion Canyon,

The flog and sag of our planet's basic path,

A tray of decent belemnites,

 

Flint jousted up, a volcano's red gash,

Our two beginnings, garden and flood

In small diagrams, the society of the shell.

 

There's the eked-out, wretched existence of the Greeks,

The coin room's coming of the principate,

Mercator's globes, vasemaker to the universe.

 

In the piecemeal correction of English,

The survival of satire, eavesdropping for blunder,

The struggle with sacrifice scratched on a rock.