Selected Poems - Hardcover

Williams, C. K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374258813 ISBN 13: 9780374258818

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994

Synopsis

For his Selected Poems, C. K. Williams has chosen from three decades of his work - ranging from his early poems to a group of new poems - to produce a volume that represents every aspect of his remarkable career.
The book opens with poems from Lies (1969) and I Am the Bitter Name (1971), which introduced Williams as one of the most gifted poets of his generation, and moves on to an exquisite series of poems inspired by the Japanese poet Issa. These are followed by a substantial portion of With Ignorance (1977), where Williams first explored the bold, sinewy, capacious long line that has become a hallmark of his work - and one of the genuine innovations in postwar American poetry. The selections from his subsequent work, Tar (1983), Flesh and Blood (1987), and A Dream of Mind (1992), show him mastering that line in fiercely unsentimental, succinct eight-line vignettes, and longer poems in which his vigilant sensibility ranges over the American moral landscape with a characteristic authority and intensity of insight.
The book closes with thirteen new poems in which the metaphysical aspect of Williams's recent work emerges with fresh and striking directness.

About this title

About the Author

C. K. Williams is a professor of English at George Mason University and lives part of the year in Paris.

Reviews

His Selected Poems sets the violent brooding of Williams's (A Dream of Mind) early writing against the lucid equanimity of his more mature work. The poetry spans three decades and offers an outline of his development. We get only occasional glimpses of the crude brutality that characterizes the poems from Lies (1969) and I am the Bitter Name (1972) in the mostly affirmative selections from Tar (1983), Flesh and Blood (1987) and his other recent books. Early, physically explicit and jarring poems like "Saint Sex" lead to the more cerebral work that has come to represent his style. The poems excerpted from The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (1983) reinforce a reader's impression of Williams's versatility while offering a formal alternative to the lengthy, Whitmanesque lines that he appears to prefer. And, though not ground-breaking, the dozen new poems here offer a closing, microcosmic view of his career with topically and stylistically familiar work. In "Villanelle of the Suicide's Mother," however, Williams unexpectedly uses a formal rhyme scheme to achieve the chilling impression of a cyclic children's song. Selected by the poet, this volume is a formidable retrospective.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Williams plucks the plums from three decades and 10 books for this delicious selection. Sometimes when a poet releases a selected works, it's easy to see in it the slow evolution from trembling, green beginner to self-confident, mentally expanded stylist. But Williams has always been the languorous observer who changes only his form, not his voice. (Still, far more substantially represented here than any other form is the powerful long line that has become his trademark and that he first explored in With Ignorance[1977].) His subject matter consists of world events, instances of human frailty, and others of shameless romanticism in a wild congeries, so that, for instance, a short poem about a child's incontinence on Easter precedes another on Bishop Tutu's visit to the White House. A complete and thoughtful collection that represents a remarkable career. Elizabeth Gunderson

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374258813
• ISBN 13: 9780374258818
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 289