Wait Poems [Paperback]

Waitfinds 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 always 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 m?tro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoyevsky, and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candor and style.

Williams manages to consistently maintain the gentle, witty, and honest voice that he has spent a lifetime crafting. Rachel A. Burns,The Harvard Crimson

C. K. Williams(19362015) published twenty-two books of poetry including,Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award;Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; andThe Singing, winner of the National Book Award. Williams was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. He wrote a critical study,On Whitman; a memoir,Misgivings; and two books of essays,Poetry and ConsciousnessandIn Time: Poets, Poems,and the Rest.

In his first new collection since his monumentalCollected Poems, Pulitzer-winner and septuagenarian Williams delivers his best book in a decade, and one of his best outright. Like W.S. Merwin's late-career masterpieceThe Shadow of Sirius, this is the kind of book that only a lifetime--of experience and writing--can yield. Publishers Weekly, starred review

[Williams] has soul: a perfect ear for the just right ending coupled with an exquisite eye for images that resonate. This book belongs on all poetry lovers' shelves. Diane Scharper, Library Journal

Williams' poems enter the brain wlG