Writers Writing Dying: Poems
Williams has won every major literary award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and published 20 poetry collections, yet he writes, One never is, really, a poet. In this humble yet raging, teasing, sensual, and bittersweet volume, Williams testifies to the maddening quest of writing, portraying himself as forever reading and getting whacked by some great poet/or other. Childhood memories propel the hard-forged Newark Noir, a protest against prejudice, while in Prose, Williams remembers being 19, crouched helplessly in myself like an ape in a cage. Bianca Burning, truly an incinerating whirlwind of a poem, turns a circus in England in 1957 into an arena for sexual terror. In these intense poems, jolting roars from the heart, Williams rails against age and death and humankind’s murderous folly, from torture to television’s sewer-stream, to those who excise complications from textbooks in Texas, to those responsible for the Gulf oil disaster. When Williams writes that we waste world, we feel the full cathartic power of his steely lyricism and truth-telling. --Donna Seaman