
Falling Ill
Last Poems
C. K. Williams(Author)
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc (Publisher)
Published on 23. January 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-0-374-53753-1 (ISBN)
Description
Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poet's task: 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, these 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.
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, these 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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight
111 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-374-53753-1 (9780374537531)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
C. K. Williams (1936-2015) published twenty-two books of poetry, including Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Singing, winner of the National Book Award.