Time and the Tilting Earth: Poems - Softcover

Williams, Miller

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807133531 ISBN 13: 9780807133538

Publisher: LSU Press, 2008

Synopsis

Time and the Tilting Earth shows Miller Williams at his sharpest. When he tells us "it's hard to be understood and make that look easy," he describes his own poetry perfectly. This latest effort from Williams provides a collection of rhythmical poems in conversational language about the nature of human beings and the world in which we live. In poems covering topics such as science, religion, and marriage, Williams displays in plentiful measures the qualities that have made him a cherished and long-admired poet: mordant and trenchant wit, expert, light-fingered technique, quick understanding of character, and skillful use of irony. In Time and the Tilting Earth, each poem, says the author, begins as the poet's and ends as the reader's.

About this title

About the Author

Miller Williams is the author, editor, or translator of thirty-four books, including fourteen volumes of poetry, Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms, and Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It. Among his many honors are the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship in Poetry from Harvard University, the Poets' Prize, the Prix de Rome for Literature, and the Academy Award for Literature, the latter two both from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was inaugural poet for Bill Clinton's second swearing-in as president, and he is the father of three-time Grammy Award--winning singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams.

From Booklist

Williams’ contributions to wise-old-guy verse are a little reminiscent in their philosophical bent and their common touch to many poems in Frost’s In the Clearing (1962). The big questions of which the collection-opening “Unrhymed Sonnet” largely consists—“What is existence?” and all the contingent queries about life, God, and time—remain as vital for Williams as they are for thought-struck adolescents. Now, of course, he is more tender about context; the poem ends in apology to the immediate auditor: “Please—just go ahead and cut my hair.” Besides eternal questions, there is a life’s accumulation of emergent situations to be considered, too, and poems about the rebirth of theology out of science, about doubting the future, about possible unforeseen consequences of population control, and about the continuing indispensability of prosody also appear. If the mention of prosody suggests off-putting bardic shoptalk, have no fear. Using conventional meters and rhyme as well as a conversational vocabulary, Williams on poetry, or physics, or God, or marriage, is as gratifying as comfortable shoes. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0807133531
• ISBN 13: 9780807133538
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 64