Hearing Silence

Poetry – at its most immediate – helps us see the world anew. In this first collection by Edward Williams, the poet sets out into some of the world's most remote and wild places – its mountainous regions – and reframes the landscape as if seen and experienced for the very first time. Williams has been a member of the Alpine Club for over 50 years and in that time has visited and climbed among many of the world's most dramatic mountain ranges. From childhood experiences in the foothills – 'a primeval urge; impelled to see what lay beyond the line where before I hadn't gone' – to the high peaks where 'the luminous glow of “white-out” leads to uncanny illusions' – Williams makes the mountain a metaphor for life. Conquests, challenges, dangers, failures – each experience on the mountain face is explored in the wider philosophical context of our mortality and spirituality. Yet these mountainscapes are not the only inspiration for the poet’s pen. Away from the Alpine extremes are meditations on everyday life: on love, childhood, birdsong, ghosts, woodland walks and wild nature closer to home. And underlying the verse, whatever its context, the poet’s all-pervasive faith