K. C.
1) Repair
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
3) On Whitman
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
C. K. Williams (1936–2015) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He taught creative writing and translation at Princeton University.
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams's personal reflection on the art of Walt Whitman
In this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated...
4) The singing
Author
Language
English
Description
... Reality has put itself so solidly before me
there's little need for mystery...Except for us, for how we take the world
to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.
-from "The World"
In his first volume since Repair, C. K. 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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
6) Wait
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
Since his first poetry collection, Lies, C. K. Williams has nurtured an incomparable reputation-as a deeply moral poet, a writer of profound emotion, and a teller of compelling stories. In Writers Writing Dying, he retains the essential parts of his poetic identity-his candor, the drama of his verses, the social conscience of his themes-while slyly reinventing himself, re-casting his voice, and in many poems examining the personal-sexual desire, the...
Author
Language
English
Description
An intense, refractory memoir by a major poet
Misgivings is C. K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, and inner conflict. Like Kafka's self-revealing Letter to His Father, Misgivings is full of doubt, both philosophical and personal, but as a work of art it is sure and true.
Williams's father was an "ordinary businessman"--angry, demanding, addicted to the...
10) Falling ill
Author
Language
English
Description
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...