Bøger af C. K. Williams

A selection from the last twenty years of C. K. Williams's career, plus new work--proof of his enduring powerC. 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 fresh and vibrant as they were when he first burst onto the scene.Selected Later Poems--a generous selection of the last two decades of Williams's poetry, capped by a gathering of new work--is a testament to that enduring vibrancy. Here are the passionate, searching, clear-eyed explorations of empathy in The Vigil; here are the candor and revelation of Repair; here are the agonizing morality of The Singing and Wait, and the unsparing reflections on aging of Writers Writing Dying; here are the poignant prose vignettes of All at Once.Williams's poetry is essential because its lyric beauty, precise and revealing images, and elegant digressions are coupled to a conscience that is both uneasy and unflinching. Selected Later Poems is at once a celebration of Williams's career, an affirmation of his continued position in the pantheon of American poets, and a kind of reckoning--a reminder of the ways in which art can serve both beauty and justice.

Short, sharp musings on things profound and mundane (and sometimes both) from the Pulitzer Prize winning poetC. K. Williams has never been afraid to push the boundaries of poetic form-in fact, he's known for it, with long, lyrical lines that compel, enthrall, and ensnare. In All at Once, Williams again embodies this spirit of experimentation, carving out fresh spaces for himself and surprising his readers once more with inventions both formal and lyrical. Somewhere between prose poems, short stories, and personal essays, the musings in this collection are profound, personal, witty, and inventive-sometimes all at once. Here are the starkly beautiful images that also pepper his poems: a neighbor's white butane tank in March "glares in the sunlight, raw and unseemly, like a breast inappropriately unclothed in the painful chill." Here are the tender, masterful sketches of characters Williams has encountered: a sign painter and skid-row denizen who makes an impression on the young soon-to-be poet with his "terrific focus, an intensity I'd never seen in an adult before." And here are a husband's hymns to his beloved wife, to her laughter, which "always has something keen and sweet to it, an edge of something like song." This is a book that provokes pathos and thought, that inspires sympathy and contemplation. It is both fiercely representative of Williams's work and like nothing he's written before-a collection to be admired, celebrated, and above all read again and again.

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

The short and sweet story of a Pulitzer–Prize winning poet’s long love affair with his wife.

All the work of this major poet who has "set a new standard for American poetry."*Collected Poems brings 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 of Tar and With Ignorance, in which Williams married the long line of Whitman to a modern's psychological self-scrutiny; the compact sonnets of Flesh and Blood; and the inward investigations of A Dream of Mind. Here are the incomparable poems from the prize winning books Repair and The Singing. Here, too, are new poems, in which Williams's moral vigilance is brought to bear, again, on life during wartime. Collected Poems is the life's work of a modern master-fiercely intelligent, arresting in its beauty, unforgettable in its echoes and reverberations.

New work from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Repair. . . Reality has put itself so solidly before methere's little need for mystery . . . Except for us, for how we take the worldto us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.--from "The World"The awards given to C.K. Williams' two most recent books--a National Book Award for The Singing and a Pulitzer Prize for Repair--complete the process by which Williams, long admired for the intensity and formal daring of his work, has come to be recognized as one of the few truly great living American poets. 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. The Singing is a direct and resonant book: searing, hearfelt, permanent.The Singing is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Poetry.

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle AwardThe Vigil, which first appeared in 1997, finds contemporary American master-poet C. K. Williams taking a more reflective and empathetic turn in his work. As Jonathan Aaron wrote in The Boston Globe: "A matchless explorer of the burdens of consciousness, Williams has always written brilliantly about human pain, that which we inflict upon others and upon ourselves, and that which we experience in dreading what we're fated for. In The Vigil Williams affirms the uncanny resiliency of love as solace for pain-what he calls 'these invisible links that allure, these transfigurations even of anguish that hold us' ('The Neighbor'). It is a mystery he has probed before, but never with quite such sympathy and candor."

C. K. Williams's work has won an essential place in contemporary American poetry. The long lines that have characterized his style since the mid-seventies have allowed him to make ever more radical forays into what Edward Hirsch, writing in The New York Times Book Review, has called "a unique and inclusive poetry of consciousness". Williams's new collection is dominated by the long title poem, "A Dream of Mind", which explores the materials and qualities of states of consciousness with enormous flexibility and suppleness. Other poems make similar investigations of jealousy, family life, and psychological and intellectual constructs. Passionate, truculent, humorous, and always questioning, C. K. Williams's poetry is, in more than one sense, the poetry of contemporary experience. This challenging, exhilarating book marks a new stage in this groundbreaking writer's constantly evolving work.

I am the reason girls are told not to trust strangers. I am their cautionary tale.

In this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it-to explore why Whitman's epic "e;continues to inspire and sometimes daunt"e; him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.

'Well this book blew my mind! What a delicious plot twist. One of the best psychological thrillers I have read in a very long time' Michelle, reader review

Winner of the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, C K Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. This book collects his prose along with a series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the state of American poetry as a whole.

Second new book by the Pulitzer prizewinning American poet since his Collected Poems (2006). Poems on the looming spectre of death, sexual desire and hubris of youth. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His new collection, Wait, finds Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by 'the conscience-beast, who harries me'. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language.