Bücher von C. K. Williams

Wait finds C. K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by "the conscience-beast, who harries me," and "riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was / for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly." Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoyevsky, and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candor and style. "Williams manages to consistently maintain the gentle, witty, and honest voice that he has spent a lifetime crafting." -Rachel A. Burns, The Harvard Crimson

All the work of this major poet who has "set a new standard for American poetry."*Collected Poems brings together in one volume C. K. Williams's work of nearly forty years, enabling readers to follow the career of this great poet through its many phases and reinventions.Here are his confrontational early poems, which bristle with a young idealist's righteous anger. Here are the roomy, rangy poems of Tar and With Ignorance, in which Williams married the long line of Whitman to a modern's psychological self-scrutiny; the compact sonnets of Flesh and Blood; and the inward investigations of A Dream of Mind. Here are the incomparable poems from the prize winning books Repair and The Singing. Here, too, are new poems, in which Williams's moral vigilance is brought to bear, again, on life during wartime. Collected Poems is the life's work of a modern master-fiercely intelligent, arresting in its beauty, unforgettable in its echoes and reverberations.

New work from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Repair. . . Reality has put itself so solidly before methere's little need for mystery . . . Except for us, for how we take the worldto us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.--from "The World"The awards given to C.K. Williams' two most recent books--a National Book Award for The Singing and a Pulitzer Prize for Repair--complete the process by which Williams, long admired for the intensity and formal daring of his work, has come to be recognized as one of the few truly great living American poets. Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity--the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events--with an intensity and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago. The Singing is a direct and resonant book: searing, hearfelt, permanent.The Singing is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Poetry.

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle AwardThe Vigil, which first appeared in 1997, finds contemporary American master-poet C. K. Williams taking a more reflective and empathetic turn in his work. As Jonathan Aaron wrote in The Boston Globe: "A matchless explorer of the burdens of consciousness, Williams has always written brilliantly about human pain, that which we inflict upon others and upon ourselves, and that which we experience in dreading what we're fated for. In The Vigil Williams affirms the uncanny resiliency of love as solace for pain-what he calls 'these invisible links that allure, these transfigurations even of anguish that hold us' ('The Neighbor'). It is a mystery he has probed before, but never with quite such sympathy and candor."

C. K. Williams's work has won an essential place in contemporary American poetry. The long lines that have characterized his style since the mid-seventies have allowed him to make ever more radical forays into what Edward Hirsch, writing in The New York Times Book Review, has called "a unique and inclusive poetry of consciousness". Williams's new collection is dominated by the long title poem, "A Dream of Mind", which explores the materials and qualities of states of consciousness with enormous flexibility and suppleness. Other poems make similar investigations of jealousy, family life, and psychological and intellectual constructs. Passionate, truculent, humorous, and always questioning, C. K. Williams's poetry is, in more than one sense, the poetry of contemporary experience. This challenging, exhilarating book marks a new stage in this groundbreaking writer's constantly evolving work.