C.K. Williams

Repair: Poems

C.K. Williams

• 2000 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
• 1999 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 1999 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 26.5

Repair is body work in C. K. Williams’s sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life’s easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: “the poetry of the sentence.”

The Vigil: Poems

C.K. Williams

• 1998 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• 1996 NBCC–Poetry finalist
• Score: 12.48

The 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.”

Flesh and Blood

C.K. Williams

• 1987 NBCC–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.37

The Singing: Poems

C.K. Williams

• 2003 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.53

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.