Although listening to music remains one of life’s pleasures it does, over time, become complex territory to navigate. It conjures ghosts of palpable intensity. Music is not only music anymore. A random encounter with the perfect track at the perfect moment may surprise you with joy, but you are just as likely to be surprised by an ache of nostalgia – or intense pain. Perhaps that is why I have made the switch to the uncontested ground of classical music. It too promises sublime peaks and troughs of emotion, but there are no corpses buried in the landscape.

Fast Music, Hugo Williams’s latest, charts our changing relationship with music: careering around the furniture as a kid, high on the vibe, heart racing with the bullet-proof eternal pulse of childhood to that aching nostalgia. Plenty of people write about old age and the dreadful beat of time’s wingèd chariot, but the poignancy of Fast Music is felt in the way music short-circuits the gap between youth and age. Sparks fly. The air crackles.

Williams opens with ‘Undiscovered Islands’, whose conceit casts the poet as mariner, seeking the shores of Utopia. The poem’s epigraph is taken from Legend’s 1968 track, ‘Typewriter’ where, on a ‘dusty desk’, the typewriter ‘sits’ and ‘never says a word’. Moving into the poem, and the silence and potential of Legend’s typewriter becomes action: ‘Days going down with a splash and a hiss / into a restless sea, / words returning with a bang and a bell / to the left-hand margin,/ pausing for a moment to reflect on the scene.’ The poet is diving for pearls, investing a life, risking a life, for scant return – returning with ‘words’, not poems – sinking a life into the time-consuming labour of construction. This labour is a sun-kissed, sword and sandals form of heroism, ‘Words in mortal combat / with arm-wrestling octopi and squid’ but, by its end, becomes more muted, with ‘words bearing news of undiscovered islands, / sometimes taking us there’ – but the thrill of the Odyssey is in the journey, not the destination, and Hugo Williams is a skilful helmsman.

After this splash of colour, Williams cuts away to the black and white past of the Phoney War with ‘Pennies from Heaven’. The song, written in 1936, and was the title track in the Bing Crosby star vehicle released the same year. The poem opens with the speaker’s am dram father applying stage make-up ‘like warpaint’, in a foreshadowing of the conflict to come, acknowledging both its costumed theatricality and its tribal physicality. Back at work, he’s ‘dressed to kill / in government-issue busman’s overcoat’. It’s another delicious duality as the humble uniform speaks of a lowly social position, but ‘dressed to kill’ casts him as a ladykiller. However, as the stanza unfolds, we see his ‘white armband for ‘Officer Material’ and ‘dressed to kill’ assumes a darker significance. Stop and look again: the 1930s… a busman’s overcoat… officer material?? Stanza two solves the mystery as we learn that his ‘debts to the Inland Revenue / amount to four figures’. He has been reduced socially by a change in fortunes – but not fully as, in this society, his class is also innate, and his playful attitude towards money is both destructive and transformative as he places the coins which comprise his wage packet onto the railway tracks to create ‘playthings for his son’.

‘Fast Music’, the collection’s title track, follows next. For the father, ‘dressed to kill’, fast music might have evoked the fleshly press of the dance hall but the son ‘ran round the room on the furniture, / […] took off in a Spitfire’, when he trips, electrocutes himself and ‘soldered [his] fingers together’. On his return from hospital, a ‘wind-up gramophone’ awaits him in his room, ‘playing ”Tico Tico’ by Ethel Smith.’ We feel the dumb, irrepressible energy of youth as the speaker is scarcely through the door from his last scrape when ‘my grandmother wound me up / and bounced me over the moon / on a lap of honour. / Black bakelite planets spun me to heaven’. ‘Wound me up’ – whether the speaker knows it, or not, the clock is ticking. Whether he feels it or not, his existence is fragile and finite. The poem’s final cosmological image is joyful, yes, but, at the same time, it shrinks the child to a mote of dust, a single electrostatic crackle in the grooves of a bakelite planet.

The collection’s second part is a sequence of sonnets: a pean to love, but also an elegy. It’s full of bravado and pathos. ‘Sell-by Date’ is intimately conversational: ‘Remember johnnies? Slippery fuckers / that seemed like a good idea at the time, / but always spoiled things later?’ Even in the octave, entropy asserts itself as ‘You kept one in your wallet for years, / until it disintegrated from neglect’ and, as we move into the sestet, the double entendre of ‘its longed-for / lubricity reached its sell-by date’ keeps things playful, regardless of the cold finality of ‘sell-by date’.

A fast life has been lived to the beat of fast music but, despite the grim medical realities of poems like ‘Enter Mr White’ and ‘Hospital Pet’, Williams ends his collection with ‘The Story So Far’, and not with a ‘sell-by date’. We return to the topological conceit of ‘Undiscovered Islands’ and continue ‘to explore the difficult terrain / where everything remains to be seen’. However, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as an old man, but with the power to restring his bow. Williams leaves us somewhere less comfortable than home, and a good deal older: We climb up into the fork / of the tallest tree / and kick the ladder away’. The wilful risk-taking boy of ‘Fast Music’ holds sway in the body of the ageing poet. When we reach our destination, it’s all over, and who would want a journey as good as this to end?

Buy Fast Music from Faber direct

RELATED LINKS

Read the review of Hugo Williams’s West End Final on Poor Rude Lines