Repair

by C.K. Williams

Repair is body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence."

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, The United States Of America, Contemporary

69 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like some of Williams' earlier books better--"Tar" and "Lies" are two that come to mind--because in them he told more stories, and the stories themselves were more memorable. There are still a few good stories here ("The Poet" and "King," for example), but many of these poems are more abstract, more interested in delineating psychological states than in recreating memories.

Williams writes the best long line in contemporary poetry (a free verse equivalent of the alexandrine or the hexameter), and his line is both sinewy and sinuous, capable of evoking both the crudest personal incident and the most delicate of psychological distinctions.

Williams can do what Whitman and Fearing do and much of what Henry James does as well, in a voice distinctively and powerfully his own.

[Eunice (nerdytalksbookblog) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Winner of the Pulitzer Prize is a must read. It was strong as it was provocative, it tackled different facets of life and history, even the Civil Rights era. The book covered lost, failure, marriage, love and all the inevitable things humans experience. Certain poems give you that perfect story that you can't help but be a part of it.

My favorites are: Ice, Archetypes, The Poet, Stone, Droplets, Risk, Glass, Dream, The Cup, Depths and Biopsy

Here's a snippet from the poem Depths

Or, with love itself, the love
that came to me so readily, so
intensely, so convincingly each timr,
and each time ravaged me
when it spoiled and failed, and left
me only memories of its oromise.
Could real love ever come to me?
Would I distort it if it did?
Even now I feel a frost of fear
to think I might not have found you,
my love, or not believed in you,
and still be reeling on another roof.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Veers wildly between astonishingly precise, almost surgical description and a mind-boggling, why-would-anyone-think-this-is -publishable degree of navel-gazing white-dude solipsism.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Repair

I liked this collection which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2000. This style of poetry is conventional.

Here are my four favorite poems:

1. Ice - metaphorical poem of remembrances chipping ice in an ice house.

2. After Auschwitz - a vacation to Europe is spent thinking about the haunting visit to Auschwitz.

3. The Lie - we are too hard on ourselves and tell ourselves lies to boost our self esteem.

4. Dirt - story about a grandmother who washes the author’s mouth

4 stars

[Marne Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although there were a few I really enjoyed, a whole book of these wordy poems is a lot! Also, since the majority of these poems feature long lines of a standard width, you’d think the publishers (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, not exactly a budget operation) could have designed a wider format so that they didn’t have to wrap.

[theri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed the simplicity of his poetry. So often it is the language that gets me, odd juxtapositions and such, but this time it was the topics: ice, farts, zoos. Each one leads to a larger - but not farfetched - revelation about humanity.

[lex mancini · Rating 3 out of 5]

well written but not my cup of tea.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I am coming back to Williams some 7 years after his death, and probably 12 or 15 years after I first read him closely, I continue to be astonished by some very obvious aspects of his accomplishment. The syntax he uses in those long lines, both raising the language and controlling the narratives in those poems, is amazing and deserves close reading. Even study.

But there are many short lined poems in this book -- a couple of which are very direct and plain spoken, getting down some real emotion and thought. He also uses them for his slightly but certainly occasional humorous take on things. He does allow some of those poems to end up reading like moralistic allegories a few times. I know he knew what he was doing, and wonder why he went there. It must have been some kind of personal tick -- he wanted to write allegories, sometimes.

Some of these poems drift off into ideas from time to time. Philosophies. I get the sense that Williams liked to hear himself think, and even though that is fine, I find it less interesting than watching him see. Or experiencing the world with him.

Despite his perceptions and his mordant sense of humor, Williams had a dark view of the world. He is often best when writing about the worst things. But the last poem ends on the word that becomes the title. "Repair." When I get to that, I am convinced.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to rate poetry books, because there are always some poems that I love and others that I just don't relate to at all. I did mostly enjoy this collection, but there was a poem called "King" that just made me laugh in a rueful way. Williams wrote about an incident that happened on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr's funeral, about how some white cops pulled their car in front of a Black man just so that he would have to walk around it. Williams writes about how in those days, cops could beat up or kill Black men with little to no recourse, and how he's glad that it's so much better now (in 1999 or so). I'm pretty sure it was a case of things not being reported in the media, or of his living in France for half the year, but now, in 2024, his words feel so childlike and innocent, almost indecently so. I'm sure I thought the same in 1999, but the police did not stop beating up or killing Black people in 1968 and just start up again in the last ten or so years. Anyway, many good poems, but that one just made me hope that Williams has opened his eyes since then.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2000. Unlike a recent collection of poems I read by another poet, I understood these poems and they in fact, resonated with me.

My favourite was a poem dedicated to his grandson, a poem called Owen: Seven Days. For me this poem captures the unique love and feelings a grandparent has for a grandchild, something I have been fortunate to experience. The ending of the poem just brought me to tears:

"then his eyelids
start to flutter
time to sleep

and once again with
something like
another whoosh

I'm ejected back
out into my
world

bereft? no
but for an instant
maybe just a little

lonely just a
little desolated
just for a while

utterly confounded
by the sheer
propulsive

force of
being taken
by such love"

[Ethan Ksiazek · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a poetry primer for me, and it surely had its sprinkle of memorable meditations. At times the writing can be so gelled and lucent, periodized with inward halting prettyisms. Take:

“…but you stayed in yourself / and I felt again how separate we all are from one another / how even our passions, which seem to embody unities outside of time, heal only the most benign divisions / that for our more abiding terrors, we each have to find our own valor”

“these invisible links that allure, these transfigurations even of anguish that hold us”

“…down to where consciousness cries ‘Make me new,” but pleads, as pitiably, ‘Cherish me as I was.’”

[sweet orange books · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh my that was wordy. Visiting Auschwitz and comparing the "many silent space" to "school in summer" ; commenting on a blue-haired woman who farted on him at the doctor's waiting room, and imagining gases becoming colorfully visible ; being jealous of a couple who is dancing in front of him ; complaining of a person talking on the phone while the train is stopped, and contemplating the beauty of an hare ; a description of life under an igloo as to enter this collection of poems... A feeling of pathos and bitterness to the world in general. I wish more diverse and talented poets would get the Pulitzer instead.

[Riley Spellman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely one of the more intellectual, satisfying books I’ve read this year. I can see why Williams won the Pulitzer for this. I was introduced to Williams’s poetry earlier this year in another collection of various poets, and he just stands out for his intimate, beautiful thoughts on simple things (and sometimes less-simple things).

I liked his poem, “The Cup,” about a son watching his Mother drink her morning coffee with some annoyance, and I read it to my Mom—we had a good laugh. That was a favorite poem in here among many favorites.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this collection - I love the circularity of it, from Ice fracturing to Invisible Mending, as the old ladies fix clothing. I love the funny poems, like Gas, and the poems that speak to forgiveness, like Dirt, and those that explore the difficulty of holding horror and forgiveness, like After Auschwitz, and the love and terror of Biopsy. A couple are less-stunning but most of these are simply terrific.

[Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars. The poet seems very much caught up in the workings of his mind. One poem was about being caught up in one's mind. As a result, sometimes not a lot for the senses to work with. Some beautiful phrases though.

[Boydsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The descriptions of everyday life by Williams are gently placed and not fiercly or alienating as some poets try, or forget, they are leaving with the reading of each stanza. If for nothing more than Archetypes this collection is worthy of a world found in its interior gazing.

[Kevin Pal · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging collection of poems that crosses over a multitude of subjects. Filled with wonderful images and impressions, the collection won C. K. Williams (1936 - 2015) the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2000.

[Kat Dixon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of very precise poems that, despite their linguistic mastery, lack heart. Standouts include "After Auschwitz," "The Dress," "Risk," "Glass," "Lost Wax," "Space," "Not Soul," "Depths," "King," and "Biopsy."

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 3 out of 5]

well written, but not my favorite collection I've ever read. the moments described were, imagery wise, well put together & I could really appreciate that as I read.

[Theelmo26 · Rating 4 out of 5]

the content of this work is very impressive is a great book

[Jamey Boelhower · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe because I have recently finished teaching the book, Night, but the poem, "The Nail," shook me when I read it.

[Avis F. · Rating 3 out of 5]

adequate collection of poems. really liked dream, depths, and dirt. pretty much any poems that started with the letter d. even some without

[Julie Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still in love with Williams' long lines (better than his shorter lines) that dare to be breathless when speaking about global crises or the everydayness of love.

[Allison Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Average. Nothing memorable.

[Jemmie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This bite-sized collection features gorgeous language wielded with precise command. The author grounds you in a very real historical past. The work may be short, but it packs a punch.

[Beau Manglass · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sealy Challenge #4

[S.T. Brant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked it enough to be five stars but for the poetic debacle that was "King" (lousy, cloying), "Last Things" (personally off-putting) and "Gas" (unpoetic).

[Zoë Chatterton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is great at painting pictures of moments rarely spoken about.

[Meghan MURPHDADDY · Rating 3 out of 5]

This bite-sized collection features gorgeous language wielded with precise command. The author grounds you in a very real historical past. The work may be short, but it packs a punch.