''Jane Williams’s Parts of the Main is her chemistry, abuzz in a murmuration of organic electrons that at once forms memory, then problems of translation - not solely of words, but in comprehending our modernity. These shape-shifting poems are an assignation of author to grace - with it, with her, we travel to Europe, her youth, to longings of elsewhere and an ever developing raison d’être.' - Kent MacCarter
''Jane Williams is a poet who leans out of the frame, who turns your ear if not your head. In Parts of the Main we are caught - sometimes caught out - by her "days of blue and banter", "eyeball spoils of war", trees "falling like the bones of oracles". She writes the tender, the vulnerable, the unshowable. Sometimes there is a touch of the brogue. Jane Williams answers the question "Will poetry be enough?" Convincingly.' - Lizz Murphy' (Publication summary)
'This is a review of three collections of poetry by women, two published in 2019, and one, Jane Williams’s Parts of the Main, in 2017. Of the two more recent volumes, Stephanie Green consistently uses prose in Breathing in Stormy Seasons, whereas Joanne Burns writes in prose in only one section of her collection, that which bestows its title, apparently, on the collection. Williams uses prose occasionally too, with her volume including three sections with prose works in each of them.' (Introduction)
'The late British poet Geoffrey Hill once remarked that “difficult poetry is the most democratic because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings.” Hill’s poetry was often labelled “difficult” due to his penchant for unusual words and obscure historical events. By contrast, Jane Williams’s Parts of the Main is “difficult” even as she avoids archaic language to achieve a primal simplicity of statement. Her plain-speaking, highly-palatable style is the very thing that renders her poetry “difficult” as it is coupled with often disconcerting content. ' (Introduction)
'Jane Williams is one of those poets whose work becomes progressively more engaging and interesting as years, and books, pass. There isn’t much in her first book, Outside Temple Boundaries, that prepares you for how good Parts of the Main is, but then twenty years is a reasonably long time in a writing career. As poetry, these poems are not especially ambitious or experimental – by which I mean that, a few lines in, you know, at least generally, where you are, even if you hope that the direction the poem travels will not be predictable. In poetry’s house of many mansions these belong in the wing kept aside for calm, free verse meditations usually hung on some item of personal experience. But they do have threads of obsession that animate and unify them. And the most important of these is an interest in other parts of our lives, other directions our lives might have taken, those times we can be creatively lost, and how we can gain any sort of perspective on this thing called “our lives”. (Introduction)
'This is a review of three collections of poetry by women, two published in 2019, and one, Jane Williams’s Parts of the Main, in 2017. Of the two more recent volumes, Stephanie Green consistently uses prose in Breathing in Stormy Seasons, whereas Joanne Burns writes in prose in only one section of her collection, that which bestows its title, apparently, on the collection. Williams uses prose occasionally too, with her volume including three sections with prose works in each of them.' (Introduction)
'Jane Williams is one of those poets whose work becomes progressively more engaging and interesting as years, and books, pass. There isn’t much in her first book, Outside Temple Boundaries, that prepares you for how good Parts of the Main is, but then twenty years is a reasonably long time in a writing career. As poetry, these poems are not especially ambitious or experimental – by which I mean that, a few lines in, you know, at least generally, where you are, even if you hope that the direction the poem travels will not be predictable. In poetry’s house of many mansions these belong in the wing kept aside for calm, free verse meditations usually hung on some item of personal experience. But they do have threads of obsession that animate and unify them. And the most important of these is an interest in other parts of our lives, other directions our lives might have taken, those times we can be creatively lost, and how we can gain any sort of perspective on this thing called “our lives”. (Introduction)
'The late British poet Geoffrey Hill once remarked that “difficult poetry is the most democratic because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings.” Hill’s poetry was often labelled “difficult” due to his penchant for unusual words and obscure historical events. By contrast, Jane Williams’s Parts of the Main is “difficult” even as she avoids archaic language to achieve a primal simplicity of statement. Her plain-speaking, highly-palatable style is the very thing that renders her poetry “difficult” as it is coupled with often disconcerting content. ' (Introduction)
