Love in a time of lockdown

Love in its many forms dominates Badlands with an obsessive restless energy. ‘You can swim can’t you?’ Williams asks at the end of ‘The Plunge Club’ and, by the end of the pamphlet, I wasn’t so sure I could. The honesty with which he tells his stories left me scanning the horizon for the life-raft, exhilarated but exhausted. In the final poem, ‘The Story so Far’, there’s only an uneasy peace:

We climb into the fork
of the tallest tree
and kick the ladder away.

Badlands explores love in a series of exquisite, elegant fourteen-line poems — sonnets really, but like their author they aren’t bound by rules. ‘Whatever Love is’ captures the excitement of spontaneous love. I couldn’t help remembering the words of its title were used by Prince Charles in an interview before his marriage to Diana.

Then in ‘Bite Marks’ we witness lust ‘talking in moans’, while in ‘Some Hope’, the theme is obsessive love.

The love that consoles (but perhaps inhibits creativity) features in‘Ink Ink’:

she’s found a hole in my jacket,
do I want it mending?

And one even the Greeks hadn’t spotted is ‘Disco Love’, a ‘brief attempt at flight / defying gravity and depravity’.

The lockdown element is, I think, important right through the pamphlet. These are reflections and memories conceived in an isolation from which there’s no escape:

I’d willingly swagger the nut-strewn roads
if it meant escaping this peculiar
ruined afterlife we seem to have invented
but where else is there to go?
     [‘Nowhere Man’]

The question, one feels, is literal and metaphorical. All roads lead back to our need for love and the relationship to another human being, with all its difficult, messy compulsions.

In ‘Life at Sea’, we see love for the fellow-sufferer. In this case it’s two strangers, bonding over a smoke. It has an Ancient Mariner feel to it. They can’t help but repeat their stories: ‘he’d heard it all before, he said / He likened it to seasickness.’

This may be the oldest subject, but Williams explores it with such panache that I was held as entranced as any wedding guest.

David Lukens