Wait finds C. K. 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 M???tro; 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, ...
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Wait finds C. K. 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 M???tro; 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 candor and style.
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At the age of 74, the American poet C.K. Williams (b. 1936) published two important books: a study of Walt Whitman, "On Whitman" and the book under review here,"Wait", a new collection of poems. Deservedly acclaimed as a poet, Williams has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award among many other honors during his career. With his long, broken lines of free verse, energy and bravado, and plain, down-to-earth writing, Williams poetry is in the vein of Whitman's and of his own namesake, the American poet William Carlos Williams.
Although this collection of poetry is varied in theme and moods, many of the poems constitute reflections on death and on the poet's own mortality. In the title poem, Williams meditates on the inevitability of death and of the need to keep going and to continue with life. While seemingly morbid in tone, there is a feeling of will and strength in these poems. Thus in "Wait" Williams begins with a speech to a personified time, commenting on its ravages:
"Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax--
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
on part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going slowly, too slowly."
But the poem concludes on a note of affirmation for the passing beauties of life:
"Wait, though wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,
how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.
Please know I love especially you,",
Many of the poems in the collection are astringent and unsentimental parables drawn from metaphors involving various animals. Among these poems are "Thrush", "Cows", "Fish". "Wasp","Ponies", "Apes" and "Zebra". The animal poems I most enjoyed include "Miniature Poodle" in which the poet reflects on his encounter as a young man with an eccentric, middle-aged woman, and "Butterfly", in which Williams compares himself to the Japanese Haiku master,Issa:
"I must be Issa again
because, O butterfly, I say,
addressing the white
one floating beside me
which I'd never do
in my own existence, "
In other poems, Williams revisits moments of his youth, such as in the opening poem "The Gaffe" and in "On the Metro" in which the poet recollects an erotically charged incident of years past. A religious skeptic, many of the poems capture the poet's reflections on questions of philosophy, ethics and faith, such as "Two Movements for an Allegretto" (based on Beethoven's seventh symphony), "Assumptions", "All but Always", "Halo" and "Rash". In only one poem, "Jew on Bridge" does Williams expressly reflect on his Jewishness:
"Do I need forgiveness for my depression? My being depressed like a Jew?
All right then: how Jewish am I? What portion of who I am is a Jew?
I don't want vague definitions, qualifications, here on the bridge of the Jew.
I want certainty,"
Williams has always been a politically engaged writer on the American left. Poems in this collection such as "Shrapnel", "Cassandra, Iraq", "Roe v. Wade" and "Still Again, Martin Luther King, April 4, 2008" succeed as poetry while offering political observations. The poem "The United States" a reflection on a rotting battleship, and "Teachers", Williams fond look at an elementary school teacher who combatted racial prejudice among her charges, are among the better poems in the volume in combining the personal with the political voice.
With thoughts upon death, old age, and memory, C.K. William has written a resilient, tough and inspiring volume of poetry.
