Falling Ill: Last Poems

C. K. Williams

ISBN 10: 1780373554 / ISBN 13: 9781780373553

Published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # wbs4973371029

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Falling Ill: Last Poems
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1780373554
• ISBN 13: 9781780373553
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a shape-shifting poet of intense and searching originality who made 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.

Over the past half-century, he took upon himself the poet's task: to record with candour and ardour 'the burden of being alive'. In Falling Ill, his final volume of poems, he brought this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mind's encounter with the brute fact of the body's decay, the spirit's erasure.

Written with unsparing lyricism and relentless discursive logic, these brave poems face unflinchingly 'the dreadful edge of a precipice' where a futureless future stares back at them. Urgent, unpunctuated, headlong, vertiginous, they race against time to trace the sinuous, startling twists and turns of consciousness. All is coming apart, taken away, except the brilliant art to describe it all as the end is coming. All along is the reassurance of love's close presence.

Here are no easy resolutions, false consolations. Like unanswered prayers, they are poems of deep interrogation - a dialogue between the agonised 'I' in its harrowing here-and-nowness and the elusive 'you' of the beloved who flickers achingly just out of reach. C. K. William's Falling Ill will take its place among the enduring works of literature about death and departure.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

About the Author

C.K. Williams (1936-2015) published a dozen 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), Wait (2010) and Writers Writing Dying (2013). His last collection, Falling Ill, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US in 2017. 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. His other books include Poetry and Consciousness (1998), a memoir, Misgivings (2000) and On Whitman (2010).