From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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. As the title implies, these poems, which often return to Williams's trademark long lines, find the poet anticipating his end and reflecting on what came before. "How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies," Williams recalls asking a bunch of other boys at a funeral from his childhood. Over and over, Williams tries to compute the math of loss, the bottom line of what death means in life, and finds there is no answer: "Shouldn't he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever upon me,/ it didn't matter that I'd really only wanted to know how grief ends, and when?" the poem continues. Even experience can't provide solutions for the most persistent human problems, these poems attest, as in a meditation on a wasp frantic to escape window glass: "That invisible barrier between you and the world,/ between you and your truth... Stinger blunted/ wings frayed, only the battering, battered brain...."
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--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
*Starred Review* 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. Landscapes where birds peck for food, heifers rush a fence, and a girl throws down her bicycle. Williams’ poems deliver us to strange crossroads, where a thrush feeds a chick with a misshapen head and a young woman pushes an infant with Down syndrome in a stroller. Where a family comes upon a POW camp for Germans in an American city park. Williams evokes beauty and “filth / and fetor and rot.” He rails against and marvels over time. He poses impossible metaphysical questions, undermines the cherished notion of moral evolution, looks squarely at death, and mocks poetry’s pretensions. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Williams has long been a poet of conscience and outrage, and how galvanizing are these magnificent protests against war and the entire spectrum of injustices. How cutting his laments over the cruel facts of life, how glorious his “delight in astonishing being.” Exacting and impassioned, Williams adds another electrifying and important collection to his extraordinary canon. --Donna Seaman
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
