Despite the flickering nipples there are some lovely poems of shared intimacies as in Tangles where the speaker is practising stroking your hair

Despite the flickering nipples, there are some lovely poems of shared intimacies, as in “Tangles” where the speaker is “practising stroking your hair / the way you like it, / not running my fingers through it / and getting caught in the tangles, / just rubbing lightly over your head”. sway back and forth / like cobras under cloth” and “nipples flicker on and off” and give their observer “ten out of ten”. Love has now become a crazy room, “its stiffened velvet drapes hung upwards”. Towards the end of the volume, Williams enters his workroom, disoriented. “Dear Room,” he writes with a mixture of mock-heroism and defeat, “don’t tell me you’re tired too?/ You look terrible!”

The poems of Dear Room are written with the minimalism we have come to expect of Williams, and continue with the self-aware rouerie of his previous books In “Party Tricks”, “attentive breasts…

Now, however, the loss of this dangerous half-world is acknowledged, but endlessly returned to Substituted for it is the recovery of memories as poems. Here they have lived dangerously: “Love in that half-world // was a seabird’s egg, tapered and weighted”. Hugo Williams’s sequence of poems to lost love, Dear Room, is a kind of shorthand essay on mourning and melancholia, which takes up the narrative from where Billy’s Rain left off. Rooms figure as a metaphor for things both held and lost – the “dear room” which holds him and his companion “suspended / half-way between heaven and hell”. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating portrait of impotence and amorality by a writer unafraid to take risks.Michael Arditti’s ‘Unity’ is published by Maia Press. Moreover, his calculatedly dispassionate prose style makes it hard to engage with the characters or to empathise with their plight.

He is utterly convincing in his depiction of the quirks of an era in which drug-dealers sell “dope in ounces and speed in grams” and Biba is the easiest place to shoplift in London.Arnott here throws off his “geezer chic” persona to explore a world that is just as venal as that of the violence and criminality of his previous novels but which has far less of the superficial glamour. As in his best-selling Long Firm trilogy, it is Arnott’s evocation of period that constitutes his strongest suit as a writer. It is Pearson’s discovery of O’Connell’s treachery that leads him to take the action which forms the novel’s climax.Johnny Come Home is a beautifully observed and brilliantly paced book. Unlike many good writers who portray bad writers, Arnott has the courage of his descriptions and includes long passages of O’Connell’s atrocious prose.