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.