Repair : Poems - Softcover

Williams, C. K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852245107 ISBN 13: 9781852245108

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, 1999

Synopsis

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets

"Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."
Always, "What will have been done to me?"
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,
though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?"
--from "Risk"

Repair is body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence." Repair is a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

About this title

Review:

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

About the Author:

C. K. Williams lives part of the year in Paris and part in New Jersey, and teaches at Princeton University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1852245107
• ISBN 13: 9781852245108
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112