Falling Ill: Last Poems

by C.K. Williams

A capstone to an unforgettable career

Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poet’s to record with candor and ardor “the burden of being alive.” In Falling Ill , his final volume of poems, he brings 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. 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 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 agonized “I” in its harrowing here-and-nowness and the elusive “you” of the beloved who flickers achingly just out of reach.

Williams’s Falling Ill takes its place among the enduring works of literature about death and departure.

Genres: Poetry, Adult

64 pages, Hardcover

Published January 3, 2017

About the author

C.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.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

here we laughed here danced
all falls away only the tattered snatches
of what we call past
echo out from the isolate
provinces of time

A thoughtful friend bought me this, given that my August was a time of plague and death. I appreciated the gesture and found this collection poignant. Williams traces an arc of decline and that imperturbable query: why? It isn't an existential insolence, but rather a narrative which thirsts for detail from beyond oblivion.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Falling Ill is another book I read that turns out to accidentally be incredibly relevant and also entirely harrowing. This is a collection an auto-elegy finished twenty days before the poet’s death so it certainly reads that way. It’s a chronicle of diagnosis & decline and Williams burns this into his art he uses no punctuation there’s an inevitable decline it’s illustrative of the increasing difficulty he had in breathing through the course of the illness & when that realisation sinks in doesnt it just shatter.

Williams is increasingly presenting himself in my estimation as a rather unsparing master of the autobiographical collection I keep thinking about All At Once & that unbelievable ending. more more more

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

C.K. Williams's Falling Ill is a compelling study of illness, making it an interesting read this close temporally to The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. These poems, published posthumously, are elegant and quick. Every piece in the book is fifteen lines, unpunctuated and somehow simultaneously incredibly urgent and earnest and carefully constructed and mannered. One of my favorite pieces was early in the book and it encapsulates this effect, for me, perfectly. It's called "Box":

Volume I once believed of adhesive fragments
over which I presumed I'd always preside
but I'm informed has filled with renegade

somethings replacing the bits over which
I know assert nothing rather I'm more
a box in which amass insidious devourers

and when I picture myself I'm mostly
transparent not in the accusing greys of an x-ray
but in a substance something like what

was once called spirit imperceptible yet insistent
is it surprising then to imaging I might want
to flee from this box that heaves and groans

like a tree blasted by wind the cries of innocent
root twig and branch coursing through
this absence within me but no longer mine?

In other poems we get beautiful arrays of near-incomprehensibility where it feels like grammar has been thrown out--and of course it hasn't really, but you can feel it breaking: "I'm fine I like to proclaim I'm doing just / fine is what I do claim everything's excellent / working better than could be hoped". They press on from beginning to end, making a fantasically readable sequence. The sense of babble is perfect for the incoherence of illness itself--something which both Williams and Teare have demonstrated in the books I've read recently, albeit in very different ways.
Overall, I think this is a collection that really should be experienced, so the rush and fall of it come all at once over the reader with as little warning as possible; I know that was an important part of it for me.

[Alane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some absolute timeless stunners in this. There are also some that made me feel like an accidental voyeur of a person's deepest struggling. That made me uncomfortable, which is beyond odd considering I work in hospice. I tried to settle myself after reading this by recalling this is not a diary. But it sure feels like it at times.

[amanda abel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly beautiful and sad book by a brilliant writer who is adept at transforming common experiences into revelations. When faced with his impending death, he took to his work and crafted this set of intense 15-line poems (5 stanzas each in tercets), lacking punctuation and capitalization as a way that, in my perception, seems to impose order on the terrible experience while also acknowledging and going along with the hurtling free-wheeling madness that facing death must be. There are so many words for these poems, and if you’re not a masochist, they might be discouraging: brutal, devastating, excruciating. And yet, because he faces his death so unflinchingly, there is an immense power in these poems that comes from knowing himself, his vulnerability, his grief, and the grief his death will cause to his friends and his wife. The final poem is a gut punch, not just because of its content but also because of what it is literally: not just the last poem in the book, but the last poem we will ever read by CK Williams. For anyone dealing with illness and their own mortality, this is necessary. But it’s also important as an exercise in empathy. And few can bring those feelings to the surface like Williams can if you let him.

[Mark Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I bought this by chance about a year or more ago, I started reading it soon after my dad was diagnosed in early April and given up to six months, and finished the last third on the day he died in late July. It was a powerful experience reading this under those circumstances — sometimes very hard and even devastating, and other times beautiful and healing.

[abbi · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was depressing… i also think i’m too dense and naive to really understand but i will reread again in fifty years

[Kim Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a glimmering trail of the light at the end of the tunnel. Brutally honest, it allows the reader into the mind of a brilliant poet as he was going through the trials of a fatal cancer. The slim volume, coupled with single page poems in triplets that use no punctuation, and work the caesuras at the end of each line as needed, gives us the sense of wandering in a dark wood with no guideposts, just as I imagine Williams must have been. A must read.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautiful and sometimes intense read. I wish I had more time to climb inside of these poems and poke around. I recommend reading them aloud to find the cadence Williams was going for, since his line breaks and his ideas do not always line up. I was particularly fond of the poems where he works through the grief of leaving his beloved wife/partner behind. They made my chest ache a little. "Trees" especially moved me. It's a break from grieving and a departure into gratitude for their love, tinged with melancholy. I feel immense gratitude to Mr. Williams for sharing these final works with us. Over all a beautiful and poignant collection.

[Tom Romig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tragic, piercing poems written during the poet's last days with the shadow of death ever present. C.K. Williams had a long and productive life powerfully addressing issues of justice from early anti-war work through climate change, but always with a relentless personal touch, always with a compassionate eye on the human cost of injustice.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense.

[Tina Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

So very powerful. A couple phrases knocked my breath out. Want to copy down a couple poems.

[Avis F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

u're probably never more sincere than when death is lurking around the corner

[Brown Girls Read Too · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was beautifully written. Page 17 was the eye opener for me. I will definitely revisit this book later in life. The poems were honest, raw and majestic.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked his take on life but I couldn't enjoy it because of his writing style.

[Molly Mccombs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seems odd to rate a first-rate poet’s outpourings before his death. Indelibly unsparing and relatable.

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

faves:
-Next
-Better
-What
-Worse

[Scott DuJardin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An honest and therefore seeringly painful look at illness and dying. Too depressing for me to contemplate as much as it deserves to be.

[alliyah danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow i loved this so much!!! my immediate thought upon finishing this collection was "i want to read that again"

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are fine and final poems from am excellent poet who, apparently, was suffering from a terminal illness. They are serious and aware without being depressing or negative.

[David C Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't recommend this highly enough. A really beautifully written series of poems about illness, dying and death. No drama just an acute examination of an encounter that we all know is coming but don't know how to think about. A grace note to cap a fine career. Williams died in 2015

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

sad-- his honesty as he writes, watching himself dying, day-by-day