Collected Poems [Paperback]

A voice that has become utterly distinctive: restless, passionate, dogged, and uncompromising in its quest to find and speak the truth...an intelligence both compassionate and fierce'. The result is four decades of poems that delve into everything from the most joyous and private matters of the heart (he is one of our greatest love poets) to the chaos and horror of politics, warfare, and our species' seemingly innate penchant for cruelty and self-destruction. Like Whitman's, his world view is simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic. Williams' rangy, elastic lines are measures of thought, and his syntax enacts the ways in which the mind moves through mood and memory, speculation and logic. Because the voice is both cerebral and muscular in its reflexes, the music it makes feels spontaneous, individual, and directly representative of the experience of which it sings. The poems are wholly American in this regard; their simultaneous tenderness and outrage bring to mind the music of Charles Ives. Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement, but C.K. Williams is one of them. His poetry will speak to future generations, as it does to us, of what it was to be human in our time. --Chase Twichell

As much scope and truthfulness as any American poetry since Lowell and Berryman. --Michael Hofmann, TLS

C.K. Williams is the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who makes lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language.

C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936, and lives in Normandy, France. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1999 collection, Repair, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in Britain. His many other honours include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/ Voelcker Award, the Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. He has published eight books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems (1995), The Vigil (1997), Repair (1999) and The Singing (2003) - all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His Collected Poems includes over 20 new poems, and is published by Bloodaxe in November 2006 on his 70th birthday.