Selected Later Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A selection from the last twenty years of C. K. Williams's career, plus new work—proof of his enduring power
C. K. Williams's long career has been a catalog of surprises, of inventions and reinventions, of honors. His one constant is a remarkable degree of flexibility, a thrilling ability to shape-shift that goes hand in hand with an essential, enduring honesty. This rare, heady mix has ensured that William's verses have remained, from book to book, as fresh and vibrant as they were when he first burst onto the scene.
Selected Later Poems—a generous selection of the last two decades of Williams's poetry, capped by a gathering of new work—is a testament to that enduring vibrancy. Here are the passionate, searching, clear-eyed explorations of empathy in The Vigil; here is the candor and revelation of Repair; here is the agonizing morality of The Singing and Wait, and the unsparing reflections on aging of Writers Writing Dying; here are the poignant prose vignettes of All at Once.
Williams's poetry is essential because its lyric beauty, precise and revealing images, and elegant digressions are coupled to a conscience both uneasy and unflinching. Selected Later Poems is at once a celebration of Williams's career, an affirmation of his continued position in the pantheon of American poets, and a kind of reckoning—a reminder of the ways in which art can serve both beauty and justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams, winner of all three major U.S. book awards, passed away just as this book hit stores, the latest in a sequence of books seemingly meant to consolidate his legacy. He published his Collected Poems in 2006, the mortality-obsessed Writers Writing Dying in 2012, and an uneven volume of prose poems, All at Once, in 2014. This retrospective rounds up poems from those and four other books published since the late 1990s, as well as a few new poems; these late poems are not unlike the dark, piercing, obsessive, long-lined earlier poems that made him famous, except that death is almost always closing in, the lens through which everything else - sex, family, history, even poetry - is viewed. "Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss?" he writes in "Haste," with an urgency designed to rush past all his inner censors, to get the poem out before it's too late. If some of these lines feel almost dashed off, they are never frivolous. These are some of the finest contemporary poems about the fear of dying and passionate desire for more life: "one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,/ another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was."
