Repair

Rating:
Summary: The Most Penetrating Poet of Our Time: Skill and Depth
Review: C.K. Williams poems wound us to heal us. They dig deep into the psyche, revealing our intimate thoughts, our guilt, our attempts at love, our failures and little triumphs. He is the most psychologically profound poet we have writing in America today. His skill is dazzling and he keeps the reader closely with him, building a tension that is at once inviting and beguiling. We feel that we're living inside his head and he is living inside ours as we read his amazingly wrought poems. This is poetry unlike any other of our times. C.K. Williams books are worth every minute and penny we spend with them. Accessible and penetrating. Imaginative and rich, but most of all honest and true. Deeply questioning and loving, this poet blames and forgives us for all at the same time that he heals our loneliness.

Rating:
Summary: Mere description is not poetry
Review: Sure, it is excellently wrought, heavily considered, well-written description. But in the end, it has not moved-- not transformed-- not gone anywhere. That is boring, and that is what the Pulitzer people seem to like. It's not enough to be a describer of things. Newspapers and other media already do that very well. To be a poet, you've got to go somewhere, be something. Pure boredom in this book.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Penetrating Poet of Our Time: Skill and Depth
Review: This worthwhile collection of 38 poems was nominated for the National Book Award. It then went on to win the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, which is what prompted me to read it. Williams' poems are about, among other things, trying to connect with the sacred while "trapped" in a world of "abandoned, graffiti-stricken factories," portable phones, and "subdivisions, parking lots, [and] malls" ("The Train," "Not Soul"), trying to connect with others ("I felt again how separate we all are from each other," he writes in "Archetypes"), trying to connect with "those long-ago days" of childhood ("The Dress," "The Cup," "Dirt"), trying to connect with oneself ("All I see is the residue of my other failed faces," he writes in "Glass"), trying to connect with love ("Depths"), and trying to connect with his seven-day-old grandson ("Owen"). These poems are about the troubled journey of life.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Trying to connect.
Review: This worthwhile collection of 38 poems was nominated for the National Book Award. It then went on to win the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, which is what prompted me to read it. Williams' poems are about, among other things, trying to connect with the sacred while "trapped" in a world of "abandoned, graffiti-stricken factories," portable phones, and "subdivisions, parking lots, [and] malls" ("The Train," "Not Soul"), trying to connect with others ("I felt again how separate we all are from each other," he writes in "Archetypes"), trying to connect with "those long-ago days" of childhood ("The Dress," "The Cup," "Dirt"), trying to connect with oneself ("All I see is the residue of my other failed faces," he writes in "Glass"), trying to connect with love ("Depths"), and trying to connect with his seven-day-old grandson ("Owen"). These poems are about the troubled journey of life.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Precise Diction, Sharp Images
Review: Williams has nor stayed with the uniformly long and sometimes exhausting lines of his previous work, and shows us what can be done with briefer forms. The book reminds me of a visit to an ancient English home, in which a visitor wondered "How do they get that wonderful finish?" An attendant leaned forward and said "400 years of elbow grease Madam." The poems in 'Repair' are complex and multi-layered, the evidence of many years of elbow grease, and much mature reflection. I am privileged to be able to learn from them.