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Invisible Mending
The essential poetry of C. K. Williams, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
C. K. Williams (1936–2015), one of the most treasured American poets of the past century, was also one of the most surprising. From poem to poem, his voice would shift in register and style, yet a certain essence would his conviction, his ethic, and his burning gaze. As William Deresiewicz wrote in The New York Times , “Williams’s scorching honesty has always been his calling card. His poetry proceeds not from a verbal impulse, not from a lyrical impulse, not even from a prophetic or visionary impulse, but from a moral impulse. Everything, in his work, is held up to the most exacting ethical scrutiny, beginning with the poet himself.”
Invisible The Best of C. K. Williams is the essential collection of the great poet’s work. Selected by his family and friends and with an introduction by the award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, this book charts Williams’s path from gifted young poet to his status as one of the most consequential poets of his―or any―generation. “If American poetry today is, as I believe it is, more diverse than ever,” Shapiro writes, “more open to any and all forms of life, more vitally engaged with a world external to the self and shared with others, it’s because of what the poems in this volume accomplished.” This collection distills the prolific poet’s body of work into one indispensable volume, through which one can trace the shifts and innovations that Williams’s work bore on American poetry.
C. K. Williams (1936–2015), one of the most treasured American poets of the past century, was also one of the most surprising. From poem to poem, his voice would shift in register and style, yet a certain essence would his conviction, his ethic, and his burning gaze. As William Deresiewicz wrote in The New York Times , “Williams’s scorching honesty has always been his calling card. His poetry proceeds not from a verbal impulse, not from a lyrical impulse, not even from a prophetic or visionary impulse, but from a moral impulse. Everything, in his work, is held up to the most exacting ethical scrutiny, beginning with the poet himself.”
Invisible The Best of C. K. Williams is the essential collection of the great poet’s work. Selected by his family and friends and with an introduction by the award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, this book charts Williams’s path from gifted young poet to his status as one of the most consequential poets of his―or any―generation. “If American poetry today is, as I believe it is, more diverse than ever,” Shapiro writes, “more open to any and all forms of life, more vitally engaged with a world external to the self and shared with others, it’s because of what the poems in this volume accomplished.” This collection distills the prolific poet’s body of work into one indispensable volume, through which one can trace the shifts and innovations that Williams’s work bore on American poetry.
- GenresPoetry
272 pages, Paperback
Published March 26, 2024
3 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
About the author
C.K. Williams
70 books72 followersC.K. Williams was born and grew up in and around Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in philosophy and English. He has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, The Singing which won the National Book Award for 2003, and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggeheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, the Los Angeles Book Prize, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.
His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.
His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 22, 2024
love the poetry, not wild about the selections. I'd love to see more of an explanation of why the "friends and family" chose the poems they did. The 10 they chose from the multi-award-winning Repair skipped a couple of the ones I thought were his best (Gas and Dirt) and included a couple that seemed weaker (especially Owen at Seven Days- come on, three pages of meditation on a grandbaby?). It would be improved either with a description of who chose what and why or a different selection committee - academics or other poets-describing what was selection-worthy about their choices. But Williams was a fine poet.
January 24, 2024
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for early access to this collection!
To start: I don't think I had truly read C. K. Williams before this.
At least, not with any depth or focused attention. His work had appeared sporadically in various anthologies I'd waded through during my degree and after, when I was trying to read "more broadly" (will I ever be able to stop trying?). A powerhouse of modern American poetry—especially recognized by his trademark long lines and almost prosaic style—Williams remains a hugely influential voice, and I knew it was beyond time to sit down with his work.
And I was truly blown away.
Invisible Mending: The Best of C. K. Williams is a stunning collection of pieces spanning the entirety of Williams' writing. As a collection, it encapsulates the spirit of the poet and his particular lens on the world: unflinching, egotistical (in a self-honest sense), and deeply insightful, veering into the psychoanalytical.
Throughout his work, Williams makes us look at the fears and loves and hopes and base desires behind our words and actions and lives. I will order a physical copy of this collection as soon as it releases so I can revisit these poems for as long as I can read.
"Because no one came, I slept again, / and dreamed that you were here with me, / snarled on me like wire, / tangled so closely to me that we were vines / or underbrush together, / or hands clenched."
- A Day for Anne Frank
To start: I don't think I had truly read C. K. Williams before this.
At least, not with any depth or focused attention. His work had appeared sporadically in various anthologies I'd waded through during my degree and after, when I was trying to read "more broadly" (will I ever be able to stop trying?). A powerhouse of modern American poetry—especially recognized by his trademark long lines and almost prosaic style—Williams remains a hugely influential voice, and I knew it was beyond time to sit down with his work.
And I was truly blown away.
Invisible Mending: The Best of C. K. Williams is a stunning collection of pieces spanning the entirety of Williams' writing. As a collection, it encapsulates the spirit of the poet and his particular lens on the world: unflinching, egotistical (in a self-honest sense), and deeply insightful, veering into the psychoanalytical.
Throughout his work, Williams makes us look at the fears and loves and hopes and base desires behind our words and actions and lives. I will order a physical copy of this collection as soon as it releases so I can revisit these poems for as long as I can read.
"Because no one came, I slept again, / and dreamed that you were here with me, / snarled on me like wire, / tangled so closely to me that we were vines / or underbrush together, / or hands clenched."
- A Day for Anne Frank
February 29, 2024
Following in the tradition of poetry in the USA, beginning with Walt Whitman, Williams favors long lines, though not exclusively. His choice of line length allows him to create narratives as rich as short stories, while adapting a metaphysics of space in which he connects the physical with qualitative states as in his poems on the analytics of dreams and dreaming from his A Dream of Mind. His meditations on poets important to his work, the ones he’s read and the ones he knew, are pause for our consideration of the world of poetry and serious poets. His love poems tremble with a physicality in his descriptions of the body toward a deeper affinity to the sensations of Whitman’s body electric.
Selections from almost fifty years of poems of observations of strangers, nature, love, aging, and death, this is a volume essential to your poetry collection.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC
Selections from almost fifty years of poems of observations of strangers, nature, love, aging, and death, this is a volume essential to your poetry collection.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews