Nov 5th: SOS Review Of 'In A Room Darkened'

With so little space in newspapers given over to poetry most authors will happily take any book review, good, bad or indifferent. This review of IN A ROOM DARKENED is from yesterday's Scotland on Sunday.:

REBEL STRUGGLES TO TAKE A STANZA

BACK in the early 1990s Kevin Williamson arrived like a literary looter; lobbing paperback petrol bombs at Scotland's publishing establishment and raising a stiff middle finger at the country's ailing Tory rulers. His underground magazine Rebel Inc spewed out a disorientating cocktail of class A drugs, football hooliganism, club culture, uninhibited sex, expletive-peppered working class vernacular and radical politics.

As he launched the careers of Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Laura Hird, the adopted Edinburgh resident revelled in his status as bairn terrible of the capital's counter-culture.

But although he has gained a formidable reputation as a literary talent finder, the Highlander has always - his 1997 non-fiction tome Drugs And The Party Line aside - remained reluctant to launch his own forays into print. It makes it all the more surprising that the man who once vowed to "take a hammer to the literary establishment" has chosen to end his decade-long exile from the printed word by releasing a volume of poetry. What's more, Williamson announces in the introduction that he composed much of the work at Hotel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing, courtesy of winning the National Library's Robert Louis Stevenson award.

It is a bit like hearing that Richard Dawkins has become the new happy-clappy, tambourine-shaking presenter of Songs Of Praise. Yet in the pages of In A Room Darkened it is clear that Williamson still burns with political indignation and still has the ability to shock. "O where is the poetry that splashes its delight on your face like a hooker's piss," he laments in 'Poetry Has Gone Soft'.

Elsewhere he claims that he needs Scotland "framed by neighbours from hell", takes a sardonic McDiarmid-like swipe at the Caledonian cringe - "Scotland is too poor, Scotland is too small, Scotland is too afraid" - and rails against semi-colonial North British mindsets: "The tartan tat Sir Walter gave / to dress us like a happy slave, / And with it manners to behave".

For all its radical flashes, the book is predominantly a collection of love letters, from the brilliantly bittersweet 'Christine's Poem' to the toecurling Hallmark cards tweeness of 'My Mind Is Like My Bed': "always in a mess, never made up, but empty without you".

Like many of the punk generation Williamson seems torn between staying true to his angry, anti-establishment roots and embracing the material comforts of mellow middle-aged contentment. But with a cast including Taggart, Karl Marx, Walt Disney, John Coltrane, Robert the Bruce, Pinocchio, Jesus, Norman MacCaig and Grandmaster Flash, it is a genuine pleasure to watch him swither.

Marc Horne, Scotland on Sunday