The Vigil: Poems - Hardcover

Williams, C. K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374226539 ISBN 13: 9780374226534

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996

Synopsis

A collection of poetry includes works for departed family and friends, love poems, history and social poems, and a series of shorter poems that the author calls "symbols"

About this title

About the Author

C. K. William teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Reviews

A line of two-dozen syllables is, for Williams (A Dream of Mind, 1992), small potatoes. His stanzas extend to and from the book spine like knobby, elongated hands grabbing for God, for relief from pain and for love. A menagerie of woeful lives is explored, including those of a retarded woman, a metaphor-laden locust and a stroke victim. Williams wants to get miserable along with his subjects but continually finds himself too shell-shocked to be a player. In "Hawk," his response to a dying bird reminds him of his father's dying: "I was frightened then, too; then, too, something was asked and I wasn't who I wanted to be./ How seldom I am, how much more often this self-sundering doubt, this bewildering contending." He writes that a lover's pain "startled, then bored, then repelled" him, that as his mother was dying there was "Grief for my own eyes that try to seek truth, even of pain, of grief, but find only approximation." The real heart of Williams is that he fears he might just be heartless. This consternation makes him eminently appealing. However, one gets the feeling Williams wouldn't mind being pitied, even if he is a fool for love, and his wife speaks French; even if, as this work reflects, he plumbs a life that is relatively tragedy-free.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Williams is famous for his long verse line. An admirable instrument indeed, it is an Offenbach Barcarole of a line, seductively wafting us over the deeps Williams plumbs and charming attention away from the narrowness of the channel of subject matter through which he steers. This new collection is in three parts. The first consists of elegies for the dead and for the living but lost and the times that are no more. The second is a set of eight "Symbols"--poems about the imaginative significance of animals and things. The third begins with the book's title poem; the poems in it are ruefully, wistfully written from the perspective of an incipient old age in which living has become a matter of watching the ongoing project of life rather than being actively immersed in it. This would all be sentimental and mawkish if it weren't for Williams' erudition and that line, that lovely, musical line. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374226539
• ISBN 13: 9780374226534
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 77