Works
His first book, Lies, was published in 1969, and since then he has published many collections of poetry, culminating in his Collected Poems, of which Peter Campion wrote in The Boston Globe: “Throughout the five decades represented in his new Collected Poems, Williams has maintained the most sincere, and largest, ambitions. Like Yeats and Lowell before him, he writes from the borderland between private and public life…. join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity, in a way that dignifies all of our attempts to make sense of the world and of ourselves. C. K. Williams has set a new standard for American poetry.”
Another collection, Wait, appeared in 2010, and another, Writers Writing Dying, will come out in 2012.
He has written a memoir, Misgivings, which appeared in 2000, a collection of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, 1999, and critical study of Walt Whitman, On Whitman, 2010. A new collection of essays, In Time: Poets, Poems and the Rest, will be published in 2012.
Williams is also an acclaimed translator, notably of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Euripides’ The Bacchae, as well as of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and the French poet Francis Ponge.
He has also published several children’s books.
Read more about this topic: C. K. Williams
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)