OURVACATION

Welcome to my website! 

 - updated 9th April 2024

         I'm a poet, a critic, occasional novelist, occasional translator.  I was the founding editor of The Interpreter's House  magazine and, between 2015 and 2019, a volunteer for the Labour Party - but, most of the time, merely a warrior with words.  I'm interested in Victorian novels and Georgian poetry.  Among the 20th century poets I admire are Causley, Scannell, and Ruth Bidgood, who was a dear friend, and with whom I share a love of mountains and ancient buildings.  In 2019 Shoestring Press published The Fragile Bridge: New and Selected Poems, my fifth collection.

         My newest book is Ruth Bidgood: Chosen Poems, with a memoir by me.  Ruth (1922-2022) was a wonderful poet who didn't get the recognition she deserved when she was here;  I've chosen sixty of her poems and spent the last half year discovering more about her life.  Which left me admiring her more than ever.

        Hopefully, Covid is now behind us, but it's important to remember and learn from it.  During the lockdowns I created an anthology, Poems for the Year 2020: Eighty Poets on the Pandemic (Shoestring Press).    The poems come from all five continents and all corners of Britain, and are not all about doom and gloom.  Sickness, bereavement and isolation are all described, along with empty cities and animals roving the streets, but there are also some very funny and life-enhancing poems about how people coped in extraordinary times, and eventually came through. 

       I also went on writing poetry through the crisis and have a new pamphlet, After Hastings,  out from Shoestring Press.  Covid got into it somehow but the title poem is about an even greater threat to the planet:

Some of Hastings has fallen into the sea.

This time, the giant rock killed no one, but

fast forward to another century

and people will abscond, their doors will shut ,

the gracious Georgian terraces, the beach huts

be drowned, the crumbling castle overhead

collapse, the famous caves fill with salt water.

It might reach my old home, but I'll be dead,

the cliffs, like Robert Tressell's murals, gone,

and none look down on Hastings, except the moon.

       I've also recently collected my published short stories  as a free e-book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seven-Short-Stories-Merryn-Williams-ebook/dp/B0CDSDQ7QB

       My take on Jane Austen's classic novel, Mansfield Park Revisited, is available as a paperback and e-book. It moves Jane Austen's characters into the twenty-first century and considers how they might behave. You can order it or read the opening chapters via the link.