C. K. Williams

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,...

Flesh & Blood, the fifth collection by C. K. Williams, was awarded the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, Edward Hirsch noted that the book's compression and exactitude gave it "the feeling of a contemporary sonnet sequence." Hirsch added: "Like Berryman's Dream Songs or Lowell's Notebooks, Mr. Williams's short poems are shapely yet open-minded and self-generative, loosely improvisational...

"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...

"Misgivings is C.K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, inner conflict, and, finally, love." "Williams's father was an "ordinary businessman"--Angry, demanding, addicted to the tension he created with the people he loved; a man who could recite the Greek myths to his son yet vowed never to apologize to anybody. Williams's mother was a housewife, a woman with...

In his first book of poetry since Repair, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, 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 and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago. He gazes at a Rembrandt self-portrait, and from it fashions...

A little boy walking through an ordinary forest encounters an extraordinary monster.

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...