C. K Williams

An intense, refractory memoir by a major poet Misgivings is C. K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, and inner conflict. Like Kafka's self-revealing Letter to His Father, Misgivings is full of doubt, both philosophical and personal, but as a work of art it is sure and true. Williams's father was an "ordinary businessman"--angry, demanding, addicted to the...

Kate O'Leary's position in the small village in Northern Ireland has always been precarious. With strong beliefs that don't always align with those of her deeply religious community, it's a place she has nonetheless made home. Her role as the local GP, helping generations of those in need, gains her the begrudging respect of the village. That is, until a body of a young woman is found and her blood is in Kate's house. Following her arrest, the rumors...

I am the reason girls are told not to trust strangers. I am their cautionary tale. Nineteen years ago Linn Wilson was attacked. Seventeen-years-old and home alone, she'd been waiting for her friends to arrive when she heard the doorbell ring. But when she opened the door, Linn let in her worst nightmare. The culprit was never found. It was someone I knew. I am going to find out who did this to me. Now, Linn is determined to get to the bottom of the...

The eighth book-and the most various yet-by a major American poet. With his two previous books, a generous Selected Poems and The Vigil, C. K. Williams received great acclaim, including the PEN/Voelcker Award and the prestigious Berlin Prize. Repair represents an extraordinary outpouring of nearly fifty new poems. His subjects, again, are love, death, secrets among intimates, the waywardness of thought, and the violence and metaphoric power of the...

... Reality has put itself so solidly before me there's little need for mystery...Except for us, for how we take the world to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself. -from "The World" In his first volume since Repair, 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...

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 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, Dostoevsky, and...

In The Vigil, his seventh book of poetry, C. K. Williams broadens and deepens the themes of A Dream of Mind with a range and imaginative vigor that make this his most powerful book yet.

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...

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...

After many, many years of being alone, a Nobble finally finds a friend.