Items related to One Unblinking Eye: Poems
The poems in One Unblinking Eye cast a steady and serious gaze at life outside the beltways. Whether testifying at a prayer meeting in Indiana, tramping the backwoods of northern New England, or working on an oil derrick in the Gulf, the inhabitants of these poems live on the margins of society. “They are the left-behind, odd-manneredones/Who speak in starts,” Norman Williams writes of the last residents of a West Virginia mining town. Describing the woods of central Maine, he speaks of “lives ... scraped from sides/Of deer and garden plots; where double-wides,/On concrete pads abut a hard-pan road.”
It is the art of these poems to convince the reader that these lives matter. There is desperation here, and madness, but there is an equal measure of determination and faith. In one poem, Mr. Williams writes of a fisherman haunted by his daughter's death, who “casts his line/In hopes a flash and strike will draw him back.” These words describe the poet's method as well. The work in this collection is built on a supple metrical foundation; it is filled with glancing rhymes and wordplay; and it is touched off by striking images. It is, in other words, composed with care, and it richly rewards a careful reading.
Norman Williams writes in Burlington, Vermont, where he works as an attorney. His first book, The Unlovely Child, was published by Alfred A. Knopf to enthusiastic reviews. Anthony Hecht wrote that “the voice of these poems is marvelously modulated, low-key in its acceptances, modest in its exultations, steady and unintoxicated in its long vision. It is my fixed conviction that with his first book he has fashioned a landmark in our literature, and sounded a uniquely American note with beautiful certainty.”
With his second book, more than fifteen years in the making, Norman Williams reafirms the truth of that assessment.
It is the art of these poems to convince the reader that these lives matter. There is desperation here, and madness, but there is an equal measure of determination and faith. In one poem, Mr. Williams writes of a fisherman haunted by his daughter's death, who “casts his line/In hopes a flash and strike will draw him back.” These words describe the poet's method as well. The work in this collection is built on a supple metrical foundation; it is filled with glancing rhymes and wordplay; and it is touched off by striking images. It is, in other words, composed with care, and it richly rewards a careful reading.
Norman Williams writes in Burlington, Vermont, where he works as an attorney. His first book, The Unlovely Child, was published by Alfred A. Knopf to enthusiastic reviews. Anthony Hecht wrote that “the voice of these poems is marvelously modulated, low-key in its acceptances, modest in its exultations, steady and unintoxicated in its long vision. It is my fixed conviction that with his first book he has fashioned a landmark in our literature, and sounded a uniquely American note with beautiful certainty.”
With his second book, more than fifteen years in the making, Norman Williams reafirms the truth of that assessment.
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About the Author:
Recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, the I. B. Lavan Award, and the Amy Lowell Fellowship, attorney Norman Williams has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in several cases, including Williams v. Vermont.
From Booklist:
Declines, losses, and defeats are much on Williams' mind, and he adjusts to them pretty well, thanks in no small measure, it often seems, to his fluency with formal verse. The demands of form and the pleasure of making rhyme and meter elegantly float a natural-sounding, accessible diction constitute a kind of assuagement for the heart-sadness of Williams' poems about tragedy in America's heartland, aging fathers, departed lovers, and surviving children who died in infancy. There is balm, too, in the procession of the seasons, and Williams is capable of passages about those age-old changes that are as indelibly correct as anything in Frost or even Wordsworth: "Here spring begins its slow, corrosive work: / A single drip, another, then a third / Drill cigarette burns in the snow." Religion, too, affords its solace, as in "The Doomsayers Awake following the Predicted Apocalypse," about a morning whose glories "bespeak a love too eager to forgive." In Williams' work, precise imagery unites with humanity of feeling to become poetry of everlasting refreshment. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherSwallow Press
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0804010587
- ISBN 13 9780804010580
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages64
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