Falling Ill
Last Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A capstone to an unforgettable career
Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poet’s task: to record with candor and ardor “the burden of being alive.” In Falling Ill, his final volume of poems, he brings this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mind’s encounter with the brute fact of the body’s decay, the spirit’s erasure.
Written with unsparing lyricism and relentless discursive logic, these brave poems face unflinchingly “the dreadful edge of a precipice” where a futureless future stares back. Urgent, unpunctuated, headlong, vertiginous, they race against time to trace the sinuous, startling twists and turns of consciousness. All is coming apart, taken away, except the brilliant art to describe it as the end is coming. All along is the reassurance of love’s close presence.
Here are no easy resolutions, false consolations. Like unanswered prayers, they are poems of deep interrogation—a dialogue between the agonized “I” in its harrowing here-and-nowness and the elusive “you” of the beloved who flickers achingly just out of reach.
Williams’s Falling Ill takes its place among the enduring works of literature about death and departure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams (1936 2015) adds to his celebrated oeuvre with a slim posthumous volume of frank and penetrating poems that track his experience of dying. Short, direct titles, often just a single word "Diagnosis," "Telling," "Really," "Next," "Lonely," "Life" frame meditations on, or reckonings with, various aspects of illness and broader questions that death's proximity evokes. The poems are profoundly plainspoken, guided by Williams's knowledge that "my future tense is dissolving even as I watch" as well as an unshakable curiosity: "I find myself talking to death talking/ aloud asking questions in my real voice." Each poem comprises five three-line stanzas in the loose iambic pentameter that feels like conversational English. An awareness of a fixed amount of time and space looms over the collection both formally and thematically. Countering this is the breathy and headlong effect of the unpunctuated lines. The reader feels sharply how bound together living and bearing witness have been for the poet, and, in turn, the silence that is inextricable from death: "saying goodbye can seem a diminishing/ a subtraction something that must never// be thought though it already has been/ and will be again but never allowed to reach/ the lips to pass into the realm of language." The living can feel fortunate to have this clear-eyed document of a powerful writer grappling in earnest with his own demise.
