C. K Williams

The eighth book-and the most various yet-by a major American poet. With his two previous books, a generous Selected Poems and The Vigil, C. K. Williams received great acclaim, including the PEN/Voelcker Award and the prestigious Berlin Prize. Repair represents an extraordinary outpouring of nearly fifty new poems. His subjects, again, are love, death, secrets among intimates, the waywardness of thought, and the violence and metaphoric power of the...

Collected Poems brings together nearly four decades of C. K. Williams's work: more than four hundred poems that, though remarkable in their variety, have in common Williams's distinctive outlook-restless, passionate, dogged, and uncompromising in the drive to find words for the truth about life as we know it today. Williams's rangy, elastic lines are measures of thought, and in these pages we watch them unfold from his confrontational early poems...

Wait finds C. K. 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 Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and...

For his Selected Poems, C.K. Williams has chosen from three decades of his work to produce a volume that represents every aspect of his remarkable career. This collection confirms that C.K. Williams is, as Stanley Kunitz has written, "a wonderful poet, in the authentic American tradition of Walt Whitman and W.C. Williams, who tells us on every page what it meant to be alive in our time"

"A selection from the last twenty years of C. K. Williams's career, plus new work--proof of his enduring power C. K. Williams's long career has been a catalog of surprises, of inventions and reinventions, of honors. His one constant is a remarkable degree of flexibility, a thrilling ability to shape-shift that goes hand in hand with an essential, enduring honesty. This rare, heady mix has ensured that his verses have remained, from book to book, as...

A capstone to an unforgettable career Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poet's task: to record with candor and ardor "the burden of being alive." In Falling Ill, his final volume of poems, he brings this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mind's encounter with the brute fact of the body's decay, the spirit's erasure. Written with unsparing lyricism and relentless discursive...

After many, many years of being alone, a Nobble finally finds a friend.