Wait - Softcover

C.K. Williams

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852248750 ISBN 13: 9781852248758

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2010

Synopsis

C.K. Williams is the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who makes lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. His latest collection, "Wait", finds 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 Metro; 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 candour and style.

About this title

About the Author

C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936, and lives in Normandy, France. He has published ten books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems (1995), The Vigil (1997), Repair (1999) and The Singing (2003) - all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations - followed by Collected Poems (2006) and his latest collection, Wait (2010). Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987, Repair was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and The Singing won the National Book Award for 2003. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He published a memoir, Misgivings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles' Women of Trachis, Euripides' Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. His book on Walt Whitman, On Whitman, is published in 2010. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852248750
• ISBN 13: 9781852248758
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144