NO ONE knew quite how the accident happened: how at some point in the 1970s Heathcote Williams set himself alight on the doorstep of his lover, Jean Shrimpton, an icon of the age, and ended up in Charing Cross hospital. It had evidently started as a conjuring trick; he loved magic, because it gave the illusion of breaking rules. But it was unclear whether he had been eating fire, or breathing it.
Breathing it, of course. Words flamed out of him all the time, seeming to make electricity flow through his wild red hair. Poetry was nothing if it was not an incandescent roar. Its role was not to tranquillise. He could write with gentle lyricism if he chose, especially when following in his most famous book, Whale Nation, endangered creatures through the sea:
From space the planet is the territory not of humans, but of the whale
somersaulting like angels or birds
Naked, with skin like oiled silk, smooth as glass
no drag, no…Continue reading
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