Wait

by C. K. Williams

Overview

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 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 métro; 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374532765
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/26/2011
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

C. K. Williams (1936-2015) 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; and The 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 Consciousness and In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest.

Editorial Reviews

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Williams (Repair) writes two kinds of poems: proselike pieces that have a narrative drive and tight, short-lined lyrics that seem inspired by haiku. Generally focusing on dramatic situations in which a person—usually an "I"—muses on his interior life, all of the poems are surprisingly accessible, especially since some of them seem like examinations of conscience. As the poet talks to himself (or to another self "who's me yet not me") about feelings of guilt and alienation, we listen sometimes avidly. But in other instances, as with a few weaker poems, we must force ourselves to pay attention. VERDICT Although a few long-lined poems get away from the poet, who rants, puns, and otherwise indulges his sense of word play, Williams at his best 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, Towson Univ., MD

Library Journal

In his first new collection since his monumental Collected 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 masterpiece The Shadow of Sirius, this is the kind of book that only a lifetime-- of experience and writing--can yield. As the title implies, these poems, which often return to Williams's trademark long lines, find the poet anticipating his end and reflecting on what came before. "How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies," Williams recalls asking a bunch of other boys at a funeral from his childhood. Over and over, Williams tries to compute the math of loss, the bottom line of what death means in life, and finds there is no answer: "Shouldn't he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever upon me,/ it didn't matter that I'd really only wanted to know how grief ends, and when?" the poem continues. Even experience can't provide solutions for the most persistent human problems, these poems attest, as in a meditation on a wasp frantic to escape window glass: "That invisible barrier between you and the world,/ between you and your truth... Stinger blunted/ wings frayed, only the battering, battered brain...." (May)

Publishers Weekly

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

“In his first new collection since his monumental Collected 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 masterpiece The 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 with such force and velocity, you don't so much read as ride them. But for all their propulsion, every element stays in sharp focus: mindscapes of fractal intricacy.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

From the Publisher