Collected Poems

by Williams, C. K.

• ISBN13: 9780374530990
• ISBN10: 0374530998
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-11-13
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

All the work of this major poet who has "set a new standard for American poetry."* Collected Poemsbrings together in one volume C. K. Williams's work of nearly forty years, enabling readers to follow the career of this great poet through its many phases and reinventions. Here are his confrontational early poems, which bristle with a young idealist's righteous anger. Here are the roomy, rangy poems ofTarandWith Ignorance, in which Williams married the long line of Whitman to a modern's psychological self-scrutiny; the compact sonnets ofFlesh and Blood; and the inward investigations ofA Dream of Mind. Here are the incomparable poems from the prize winning booksRepairandThe Singing. Here, too, are new poems, in which Williams's moral vigilance is brought to bear, again, on life during wartime.Collected Poemsis the life's work of a modern master--fiercely intelligent, arresting in its beauty, unforgettable in its echoes and reverberations. C. K. Williamsis the author of nine books of poetry, includingFlesh and Blood(National Book Critics Circle Award, 1987),Repair(Pulitzer Prize, 2000), andThe Singing(National Book Award, 2003). His other books include translations of Sophocles'Women of Trachis, Euripides'Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge and Adam Zagajewski; a book of essays,Poetry and Consciousness; and a memoir,Misgivings. He is a member of American Academy of Arts and Letters, and teaches at Princeton University. Collected Poemsbrings 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. For Williams, poetic forms are measures of thought, and in these pages we can see both the constancy of his preoccupations and the astonishing variety of means he has brought to the expression of them. His voice is both cerebral and muscular, capable of the eight-line poems ofFlesh and Bloodand the inward soundings ofA Dream of Mind--and of the two together in the award-winning recent booksRepairandThe Singing. These poems feel spontaneous, individual, and directly representative of the experience of which they sing; open to life, they chafe against summary and conclusion. "Mr. Williams has supremely invented his poet. As a few poets do, he has created a world: turbulent, craggy and sometimes didactic. And one in which, with a warily agile skip or two among boxcars, a reader can find an explorer's reward."--Richard Eder,The New York Times "C.K. Williams' poems are broad in scale and narrow in scope . . . His lines, longer than those written by any other significant English-language poet, suggest a big, Whitman-like appetite for worldly variety."--Dan Chiasson,The New York Times Book Review "As the poet's sentences circle and plunge across his lines like plaited sinews, they join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity, in a way that dignifies all of our attempts to make sense of the world and of ourselves. C. K. Williams has set a new standard for American poetry."--Peter Campion,The Boston Globe "Mr. Williams has supremely invented his poet. As a few poets do, he has created a world: turbulent, craggy and sometimes didactic. And one in which, with a warily agile skip or two among boxcars, a reader can find an explorer's reward."

Author Biography

C. K. Williams's books of poetry include Repair (Pulitzer Prize, 2002) and The Singing (National Book Award, 2003). He is also the author of a memoir, Misgivings. He teaches at Princeton University and lives part of the year in France.

Table of Contents

“Williams seems to me to fulfill, triumphantly, the big demands he places on himself. Reading his poems, you sense their considerable formal beauty, yet you also hear something more: a voice that has become a representative consciousness . . . As the poet's sentences circle and plunge across his lines like plaited sinews, they join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity,
in a way that dignifies all of our attempts to make sense of the world and of ourselves.” —*Peter Campion, The Boston Globe