Double - John Hartley Williams

John Hartley Williams was an English poet marooned in Berlin, where he lived for most of his life, through times of great upheaval and change. The streets he knew in West Berlin used to peter out in a dead arena of cobbles and waste ground blanked off by the Wall. 'Real-existing socialism', whichever way you pointed, was drben - over there. The poems in Double are located somewhere in between. As the dilapidation of one half of the city vanishes, Williams was troubled by "normalisation". All traces of an alternative way of doing things are being erased. The poems reect the presence of that invisible stranger on the other side of the Wall, whose presence could always be felt, even if symbolically denied. A denial now becoming fact. He connects his adopted home with the London of his childhood and youth, and with what a city means on a personal level, through poems about love, death and memories of an earlier time, through memory within memory, desire within desire.