Before he introduced 'goth' and 'grunge' elements into the haiku world and helped popularise Persian poetry in the English language with his journal Contemporary Ghazals, R. W. Watkins was writing a jazzy, erotic free verse derived primarily from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jim Morrison and Dylan Thomas. Direct Lines to Hell is the first of two volumes consisting of those (mostly) unpublished poems written between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s. Volume One focusses on the longer and more surrealistic verse that is most representative of Watkins's early style. It comes complete with a lengthy commentary and scans of early manuscripts and pages from Watkins's notebooks.