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.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
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,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
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.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
US$ 4.25
From Canada to U.S.A.
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Paperback. Publisher overstock, may contain remainder mark on edge. Seller Inventory # 9780374527068B
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 468668-n
Book Description Paperback or Softback. Condition: New. Repair: Poems 0.25. Book. Seller Inventory # BBS-9780374527068
Book Description PAP. Condition: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON DEMAND. Established seller since 2000. Seller Inventory # L0-9780374527068
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Brand New! This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # 0374527067
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # ABLING22Oct2018170010162
Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. Seller Inventory # 0374527067-2-1
Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. Seller Inventory # 353-0374527067-new
Book Description Trade Paperback. Condition: New. No Jacket. New Book. Seller Inventory # 057903
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # I-9780374527068