The Singing: Poems [Paperback]

C. K. Williams (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374529507 | ISBN-13: 978-0374529505 | Publication Date: October 7, 2004 | Edition: 1st

New work from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Repair

. . . 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.
--from "The World"

The awards given to C.K. Williams' two most recent books--a National Book Award for The Singing and a Pulitzer Prize for Repair--complete the process by which Williams, long admired for the intensity and formal daring of his work, has come to be recognized as one of the few truly great living American poets. 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. The Singing is a direct and resonant book: searing, hearfelt, permanent.

 

The Singing is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Poetry.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of 14 books of poetry, Pulitzer Prize-winner Williams continues in his new collection to give voice to fleeting moments of domestic rapture and despair that seem to always arrive wrapped in mortality. Typical is a poem about a brief, quotidian exchange between lovers, which for Williams turns into a moment that "could go on expanding/ like this forever/ with nothing changed"-if it weren't for death. Although a number of the poems in this volume reach beyond the first person (a lyrical piece about a girl's suicide, a pair of rather lukewarm poems about terrorism), the work is chiefly concerned with age. In a poem about Rembrandt's self-portrait, the speaker articulates his growing comfort with the fact that "whatever it is beyond/ dying and fear of dying/... eludes me,/ yet no longer eludes me." The poems signal a cognizance of the obsessiveness with which they mine the personal: a poem titled "Narcissism" declares, "...The word alone sizzles like boiling acid, moans like molten lead,/ but ah my dear, it leaves the lips in such a sweetly murmuring hum." They are saved from disappearing down their own rabbit hole by the skillful ease of Williams's technique-in his trademark long lines, and in other, more varied forms, the poems can seem to write themselves-and by moments that try to register a wider range of experience: "the love of others the miracle of others all that which feels like enough/ is truly enough/ no celestial sea... just life hanging on/ for dear life."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Williams has written, "Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by." This crucial observation can be read as Williams' creative credo because he has taken as his mission the articulation of those aspects of life that haunt and plague us the most: lost love, brute aggression, hate, and death. Williams dissects and ponders these dark mysteries within the contexts of life's implacable organic imperatives and history's compelling yet ineffectual cautionary tales, thus breaking through the isolation and despair contemplation of harsh realities can engender. Hope resides in the forging of such philosophical connections and in the perspective they provide, and there is joy, too, in experiencing Williams' candor and command of language and imagery. This is an altogether transfixing and cathartically probing collection, but it reaches its highest peaks in a set of poems in which Williams offers deep and anchoring insights into the time of war that began on September 11, 2001, and in the ravishingly beautiful cycle "Elegy to an Artist," a tribute to friendship and ringing testimony to the radiance of the human spirit and the consolation of art. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (October 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374529507
• ISBN-13: 978-0374529505
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #568,451 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Uneven, September 29, 2004

By 

C M Magee (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Singing: Poems (Hardcover)

There are handful of very moving poems in this collection. Williams' best poems are grounded by concrete imagery, and they are engagingly anecdotal. But there are too many poems in this book that aren't tethered to earthly things at all, and it is difficult for the reader to reach them. He writes engagingly about growing old and about war. The best in the collection is called "The Hearth."

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars SINGING?, May 30, 2004

By 

"finch334" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Singing: Poems (Hardcover)

I bought all of Williams' books at once and, for some reason, started with THE SINGING. The first section impressed me but then the other 3 sections went f l a t. The second section looks like a bad attempt at using the ghazal as a (new) form. After that, with the exception, maybe, of "In The Forest", f l a t. I've gone back to NEW & SELECTED and it's better. But THE SINGING is not a must-have.