Jennifer Williams

And

These books were published by Alice James Books in the States and by Blood X Books in the UK so actually I was delighted because I could pull them right off the shelf here in the Poetry Library and I did just want to mention as well that

Brian has a memoir coming out with Jonathan Cape this year, and so we're very pleased that he's going to be back in Edinburgh in August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, so we will make sure this is out before then, so hopefully if you haven't caught him at Stanza, you'll definitely be able to see him at the book festival this year.

But anyway, Brian, I just read Here Bullet a couple weeks ago, and I was so blown away...

I was very moved by it, and I literally did laugh and cry while reading it.

I thought it was such a powerful and really both heart-rending and exquisitely beautiful collection, and it had a wonderful kind of shape and wholeness to it.

So we're going to get to hear, I think, some poems from that collection and maybe from Phantom Note as well, and talk a little bit about them.

But I'll let you read a poem first, and then we can talk about it.

It's great to hear it in your voice.

And that list, that sense of a kind of list that's pushing you forward, driving you forward through the poem.

It's interesting, isn't it?

And these things, you know, they're like little...

they can be sort of wonderful.

I'm thinking of like the word worm, but that sounds horrible.

But you know those little bits of songs that go into your head and circle around and around and around, and you don't even know.

And sometimes I worry about that with poetry, that you write a line, and you think, oh, that's a great line, and then you wonder, I hope that's not something I write all the time.

I think I became so in love with it that I... I remember crying once reading one of her books because I just thought, this is so beautiful to me and I'll never be able to do this.

And then I think I found, not realizing it, that I went through a phase of... I could see myself writing in a manner, you know, a kind of echo of her... It's the sound of it, really, you know.

I could hear myself breaking lines almost in a Glyckian way or something.

And then it was...