Debris collects poems from Daniel Huws’ first two books, Noth (1972) and The Quarry (1999), alongside a substantial set of new poems and translations, and a few occasional poems.

 

Huws is now ninety-three and, while this is only his third collection of poems, Debris justifies Daniel Weissbort’s comment in PN Review: ‘one difficulty in reviewing Huws is precisely that he never wrote, or at least released, a dud poem.’ Huws’ poems are true lyrics, seeming to emerge out of often difficult or obscure moments whose import and meaning only come into view as they find their brief lyric shape.

 

Huws’ lifelong friend, Ted Hughes – they studied together at Cambridge in the 1950s – wrote of his poems that ‘There is nothing fashionable about [Huws’ poems]. The all-inclusive, wholly human, wholly musical, final simplicity of the oldest folk-rhymes and songs was the ultimate aim of such a poet as Yeats... Anyone with an ear to hear will recognise the genuine substance and accent of that poetry in Daniel Huws.’ Ted Hughes is himself the subject of a witty, newly published occasional poem dedicated to Hughes on his accession to the role of British poet laureate.