Randall Jarrell famously compared the likelihood of writing a good poem to that of being struck by a meteor. If that's the case, C.K. Williams has been defying the odds for almost 20 years, ever since he published Tar. That collection, which appeared in 1983, marked the debut of his poetic signature: the lengthy, elaborately discursive line, packed to the gills with novelistic detail. And since then, with Flesh and Blood and The Vigil, he's only refined his methods. At times Williams seems to be working that no man's land between prose and verse, daring us to read him as a rococo Raymond Carver--an Ash Can School unto himself. But he always manages to pull one more syntactical miracle from his hat, reminding us that he's a poet after all, and a superlative one. In any case, he continues his winning streak with Repair. Here as before, Williams remains a meticulous observer of the natural world. But always he invests nature with meaning--and in his brilliant hands, the pathetic fallacy becomes anything but pathetic. Note, for example, how the subject of "Tree" takes on a very human quotient of knowledge and neurosis: One vast segment of tree, the very topmost, bows ceremoniously against a breath of breeze,
patient, sagacious, apparently possessing the wisdom such a union of space, light, and matter should.
Just beneath, though grazed by the same barely perceptible zephyr, a knot of leaves quakes hectically,
as though trying to convince that more pacific presence above of its anxieties, its dire forebodings.
Elsewhere Williams works his magic on a pair of shoes, an urban rainstorm, racial tension, or (in what might be a first in his oeuvre) the "really quite inoffensive pop" of a stranger's flatulence. These subjects, too, lead him straight to his great preoccupation, which is consciousness itself. But not surprisingly, the 62-year-old poet has begun to concoct his own Intimations of Mortality, which focus precisely on that slow or rapid extinction of mind. "Last Things," "Not Soul," and "House" are all exquisite, melancholy variations on this single theme. Yet "Tender" is the real masterpiece in this category: a compact, deeply surprising lyric in which a dinghy (!) becomes a figure for our mortal imaginings: "An inflatable tender, tethered to the stern, just skims the commotion of the wake: / within it will be oars, a miniature motor, and, tucked into a pocket, life vests. / Such reassuring redundancy: don't we desire just such an accessory, faith perhaps, / or at a certain age to be comforted, not daunted, by knowing one will really die?" No sane reader can hear this poem without concluding that Williams has been struck by a meteor once again. --James Marcus
From Library Journal
A prolific poet and translator, winner of numerous awards and fellowships, Williams (The Vigil, Farrar, 1997) is best known for his breathless, long, and often prosaic line. But in this eighth volume of poetry, he intersperses short-lined poemsAperhaps his finest works to date. Focused and lyrical, they include delicate love poems set against precarious backdrops. "Dirt," for example, speaks of the grandmother who washed his mouth out with soap and how he "never, until now, loved her again." One senses the poem itself becoming the instrument of healing and loving. Aptly titled, this entire volume deals with self-understanding in a world where there is "no end to our self-shaping." Williams's most compelling insights are often embedded in the mundane: the sight of his face in the mirror, a pair of shoes left on a windowsill. Together and apart, these images lead him toward "the space within me, within which I partly, or possibly most exist." Yes. Recommended for most collections.ARochelle Ratner, formerly with, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Williams is known for his long lines, which have come to reflect the length and vitality of his writing life. Now a grandfather (an attainment he slyly celebrates in a poem with conspicuously baby-size lines), Williams has nonetheless retained a youthful ardor for inquiry into various states of being. The natural world intrigues him, and he seems to have X-ray vision into stone, ice, dirt, a tree, and a hare seen from a stalled train as the voice of a man seated behind him speaking hammerlike into a cellular phone drives every thought from his head. Williams fully enters any given moment, whether it's a sudden inexplicable estrangement from a loved one or the pull of a troubling memory of his mother sipping coffee in the morning like some alien creature. Williams manages to be at once wistful and robust, philosophical and bewildered. He marvels at love, feels sorrow and helplessness over the tragedies of racism and poverty, and praises the ancient arts of "forgiveness and repair." Donna Seaman
From Kirkus Reviews
The much-celebrated Princeton professor (whose honors include an NBCC award) provides in this, his eight book of verse, a wishful definition of his art: a poet is someone who lives in words, making a world from their music. Elsewhere, he reveals his dissatisfaction with language when sculpting with wax, something real, instead of words. Such confusion about his work results partly from Williamss clumsy stylehes made the extra-long-line his trademark, but his pronouns often lose their referent as a result; his stale and undistinguished vocabulary is propped up by a preponderance of adverbs; and his flat and wordy lines derive their only rhythms from the pointless repetition of phrases. The author sticks with the driving themes of his previous volumes: the struggle between consciousness (a word he uses way too often) and being in the moment; between love and despair; between the heart and the mindthough neither of these fares well. Williamss testaments to love are cloying at best: in a poem to his newborn grandson, he enters the childs consciousness and is overwhelmed by such love; in Depths, a childhood fear anticipates the poets fear of never having found his true love; and Lost Wax answers its own questionWhat make you whole? [sic] with Love. My love. Williamss long, touchy-feely personal narratives are particularly limp: The Poet profiles a self-styled poet from the years of hippiedom who scares the guilt-ridden Williams; and Kinga knee-jerk narrative about crying at a Martin Luther King memorialis a self-serving gush about feeling his black friends pain. Williams should stick to poems like Invisible Mending, a lovely portrait of three seamstresses working in a storefront window, seen as angels of forgiveness and repair. Its hard to find a whole lot to enjoy in a poet who moans: The agonizing plasma consciousness can be. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
After Auschwitz
Archetypes
Biopsy
The Blow
Bone
Canal
The Cup
The Dance
Depths
Dirt
Dream
The Dress
Droplets
Gas
Glass
House
Ice (1)
Invisible Mending
The Island
King
Last Things
The Lie
Lost Wax
The Nail
Naked
Not Soul
Owen: Seven Days
The Poet
Risk
Shock
Shoe
Space
Stone
Swifts
Tantrum
Tender
The Train
Tree
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® About the Author
C. K. Williams lives part of the year in Paris and part in New York, and teaches at Princeton University.
