There is a wonderful sestina about dying in John Hartley Williams’ The Golden Age Of Smoking (Shoestring Press, £10): “What’s the point of going on about death? / It’s coming for you and me sure as trouble / and brooding on it takes away the fun / I’m having with the six foot long oak box / I’ve bought on credit from the Funeral Doctor / where they let you paint it, give the thing a name. //Majestic Slipway Dreadnought is the name / I’ve given mine. That gets the gravitas into death... on the stern I’ll write Trouble Is My Business so the worms reading the box / will know to get their friends to join the fun.”

Stand Up is a poem about mortality, grave humour and the art of taking laughter seriously. And of course it is not a “stand-up” poem. But it is impossible to read this poem and not smile, for John Hartley Williams died in May this year of cancer at the age of 72, just after the publication of The Golden Age Of Smoking. 

Williams was one of our best comic poets. Not that he ever told jokes on stage, or constructed a whole poem around a lumbering punch-line. But all his collections, from Bright River Yonder to Canada, Blues, A Poetry Inferno and Death Comes For The Poets — a spoof crime novel in which several thinly disguised contemporary poets are murdered — are held together by a wry, sly, understated and elegant wit.

These days of course, we have comedians pretending they are poets and poets trying to be funny. But there is more to poetry than comedy, and there is more to comedy than Stand Up. 

In The Golden Age Of Smoking there are several different kinds of laughter. There is the cruel laughter of schoolboys in The Boy Who Didn’t Make It, and the manic grinning and gurning of Welcome To The Multiplex! In By The Shore Williams remembers his friend, the late poet Ken Smith, with whom he still conducts imaginary conversations that make him laugh because Smith was “so funny, so sad.”

There is the happy-clappy laughter of Democracy: “The flag marches across the stinking landscape; and our gibberish stuffs the trombone... “We’re cooking up a death ideology; knowing nothing of anything, we’ll service excess; let the world croak, it deserves to. That’s progress. Forward, march!”

Then there is the hysterical laughter of the wonderfully silly fable The Ride: “This Donkey Five Quid read the sign. / I brought the car to a squealing stop. / No, said my wife, we don’t need a donkey. / It’s only five quid! I said.  We’ve no room, / she said. It’s the bargain of a lifetime, I said. / Where will you put it? She said/ In the / garage, I said. And where will you put / the car? She said. Who needs a car, I said // when you have a donkey...”

Williams — who lived and worked in France, Yugoslavia and Berlin for most of his life — was a very English surrealist, combining extravagant lurches of imagination and virtuoso technique. The book is worth buying just for Andre Breton iI Mexico, Yaggle, The Theory Of Gravy, Cracked Piano Music and the fabulous Reds, about the decline of the red squirrel: ‘We must protect our trees. / Fell them! Fell them! Let clearances prepare a country free of verticals. / Eradicate this hollow ginger wit / of quips, unseemliness and flashing tails! //We must introduce the market trader gray. / It will feed from outstretched hands. / It prefers the ground to trees. Act now to end / the grind of teeth on fabulous lofty nuts! / Silence that chomping on the really significant cones!”