Collected Poems - Softcover

"Williams seems to me to fulfill, triumphantly, the big demands he places on himself. Reading his poems, you sense their considerable formal beauty, yet you also hear something more: a voice that has become a representative consciousness . . . As the poet's sentences circle and plunge across his lines like plaited sinews, they join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity, in a way that dignifies all of our attempts to make sense of the world and of ourselves." --Peter Campion, The Boston Globe

All the work of this major poet who has "set a new standard for American poetry."*

Collected Poems brings together in one volume C. K. Williams’s work of nearly forty years, enabling readers to follow the career of this great poet through its many phases and reinventions.

Here are his confrontational early poems, which bristle with a young idealist’s righteous anger. Here are the roomy, rangy poems of Tar and With Ignorance, in which Williams married the long line of Whitman to a modern’s psychological self-scrutiny; the compact sonnets of Flesh and Blood; and the inward investigations of A Dream of Mind. Here are the incomparable poems from the prize winning books Repair and The Singing. Here, too, are new poems, in which Williams’s moral vigilance is brought to bear, again, on life during wartime. Collected Poems is the life’s work of a modern master—fiercely intelligent, arresting in its beauty, unforgettable in its echoes and reverberations.