The Singing: Poems
Books / Hardcover
Books › Poetry › American › General
ISBN: 0374292868 / Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2003
Presents a collection of poems that consider such topics as the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, childhood memories, current events, the poet's self image, and contemporary life during wartime.
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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"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 and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago. He gazes at a Rembrandt self-portrait, and from it fashions a self-portrait of his own. He ponders an "anatomical effigy" at the Museum of Mankind, an in so doing "dissects" our common humanity. Stoking a fire at a house in the country, he recalls a friend who was burned horribly in war, and then turns, with eloquence and authority, to contemporary life during wartime, asking "how those with power over us can effect these things, by what cynical reasoning do they pardon themselves." The Singing is a direct and resonant book: touching, searching, heartfelt, permanent. The Singing is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Poetry.
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