Bright River Yonder is a baroque Wild West poetry adventure: in which a mysterious silver dollar is passed from hand to hand, from poem to poem. John Hartley Williams's second collection is indescribable and utterly compelling. Its centrepiece, the long poem 'Ephraim Destiny's Perfectly Utter Darkness', won the £5000 first prize in the Arvon/Sothebys national poetry competition judged by Basil Bunting, Michael Baldwin, George Barker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrian Mitchell, Peter Redgrove and Stephen Spender.