Invisible Mending
The Best of C. K. Williams
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The essential poetry of C. K. Williams, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
C. K. Williams (1936–2015), one of the most treasured American poets of the past century, was also one of the most surprising. From poem to poem, his voice would shift in register and style, yet a certain essence would remain: his conviction, his ethic, and his burning gaze. As William Deresiewicz wrote in The New York Times, “Williams’s scorching honesty has always been his calling card. His poetry proceeds not from a verbal impulse, not from a lyrical impulse, not even from a prophetic or visionary impulse, but from a moral impulse. Everything, in his work, is held up to the most exacting ethical scrutiny, beginning with the poet himself.”
Invisible Mending: The Best of C. K. Williams is the essential collection of the great poet’s work. Selected by his family and friends and with an introduction by the award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, this book charts Williams’s path from gifted young poet to his status as one of the most consequential poets of his—or any—generation. “If American poetry today is, as I believe it is, more diverse than ever,” Shapiro writes, “more open to any and all forms of life, more vitally engaged with a world external to the self and shared with others, it’s because of what the poems in this volume accomplished.” This collection distills the prolific poet’s body of work into one indispensable volume, through which one can trace the shifts and innovations that Williams’s work bore on American poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This remarkable volume gathers essential work from Williams (1936–2015; Falling Ill), highlighting his ranging thought and moral intensity as well as his transformations as a poet. In the introduction, Alan Shapiro describes how Williams's shift to long lines in his later work allowed the poet to expand his ethical concerns into new territory: "In his hands, the long line itself becomes a remarkably flexible instrument, accommodating almost any kind of subject or experience." Shorter, imagistic lines of early poems—"The twilight rots./ Over the greasy bridges and factories,/ it dissolves/ and the clouds swamp in its rose/ to nothing"—give way to Williams's characteristic longer lines as he continues to search for answers that don't easily come, as in this haunting realization from "The Shade": "If this were the last morning of the world, if time had finally moved inside us and erupted/... I think I'd still be here,/ afraid or not enough afraid, silently howling the names of death over the grass and asphalt." In "The World," Williams's late voice retains his concern for truth but trades anxiety for awe: "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." Sensitive and humane, this dazzles.
