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. In The Singing - his first book of poetry since Repair - Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity - the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events - with an intensity and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published 40 years ago. He gazes at a Rembrandt self-portrait, and from it fashions a self-portrait of his own. He ponders an "anatomical effigy" at the Museum of Mankind, and in so doing "dissects" our common humanity. Stoking a fire at a house in the country, he recalls a friend who was burned horribly in war, and then turns, with eloquence and authority, to contemporary life during wartime, asking 'how those with power over us can effect these things, by what cynical reasoning do they pardon themselves'. The Singing is a direct and resonant book: tough, searching, heartfelt, permanent. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
There were a couple of poems that I liked but on the whole, there's nothing about this collection of poems that makes me want to sing praises. Maybe I've forgotten how to appreciate poetry or maybe I don't get free verse that modern poems often take on.
