C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. His new collection, "Wait", finds Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by 'the conscience-beast, who harries me', and 'riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly'. Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Metro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candour and style. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
- ISBN10 1429961295
- ISBN13 9781429961295
- Publish Date 9 September 2014 (first published 27 April 2010)
- Publish Status Active
- Imprint Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Format eBook
- Pages 144
- Language English