Wait: Poems
Books / Hardcover
Books › Poetry › American › General
ISBN: 0374285918 / Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2010
Presents a collection of poems exploring a range of subjects and emotions, from animals and rural life to shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Mâetro.
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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 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.
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