Wait bookcover

Wait

Poems
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
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Description

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.

Product Details

PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Publish DateApril 27, 2010
Pages144
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconHardback
EAN/UPC9780374285913
Dimensions228.6 X 6.0 X 12.7 inches | 0.8 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry

About the Author

C. K. Williams (1936–2015) published twenty-three books of poetry, including Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Singing, winner of the National Book Award. He lived in New Jersey.

Reviews

“Williams manages to consistently maintain the gentle, witty, and honest voice that he has spent a lifetime crafting.” —Rachel A. Burns, The Harvard Crimson

“In his first new collection since his monumental Collected Poems, Pulitzer-winner and septuagenarian Williams delivers his best book in a decade, and one of his best outright. Like W.S. Merwin's late-career masterpiece The Shadow of Sirius, this is the kind of book that only a lifetime--of experience and writing--can yield.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[Williams] has soul: a perfect ear for the just right ending coupled with an exquisite eye for images that resonate. This book belongs on all poetry lovers' shelves.” —Diane Scharper, Library Journal

“Williams' poems enter the brain with such force and velocity, you don't so much read as ride them. But for all their propulsion, every element stays in sharp focus: mindscapes of fractal intricacy.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

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