Selected later poems

IN POETRY, as in so much else, there is the career and then the life, and it is folly to mistake one for the other. The career of C.K. Williams, who died in September, precedes him. Winner of the trifecta of American book awards (the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a longtime professor at Princeton University and the recipient of almost every major fellowship and citation available to poets. He published well and often, writing 21 books of poetry (which include an earlier volume of selected poems and two editions of collected poems, the second published in 2006), a memoir, three books of essays, two children's books, several volumes of translation and, earlier this year, his 22 nd collection, "Selected Later Poems." As a part of the career, the book is not, then, unexpected. With the life's work complete, the poems here, culled from Williams's last six full-length collections and including a sampling of his uncollected, newer work, will presumably be folded into a definitive posthumous edition of the collected poems. But as an artifact of the life, the book is timely and essential, passionately elaborating on all the major themes of Williams's oeuvre: sex, death and dying; the loneliness of living on the earth without a present God; the disjunction between psyche and society. Williams was known for his insistently ethical approach to writing poems ("We have the obligation to discipline ourselves and our poems morally, to the point of apparent cruelty," he once wrote), and what is most powerful about these later poems is his willingness to follow through. There are poems of great beauty here, but also failed experiments, political opinions (Williams was an assiduous consumer of news) and epic narratives of erudite self-loathing - all of which make up exactly the deep pleasure of reading this particular collection. Born in Newark in 1936, only three years after Philip Roth, with whom he shares many themes, Williams was a poet of the social and the sensory. Poems about cloying maternal ambivalence ("The Dress"), the discovery in childhood of the horrifying fact of death ("Of Childhood the Dark"), the nostalgias of lost loves ("Wood") and lust ("On the Métro") are the poetic equivalents of later works by Roth like "The Dying Animal" and "Everyman." There is a visceral discomfort in reading such material - a sense a human boundary has been knowingly traversed, an intimacy exploited. In contrast to these later works of Roth's, however (or of Coetzee in a novel like "Disgrace"), Williams's intrusions into others' private lives feel less acquisitive than desperate. There is an incredible loneliness in Williams's work, a painful intellectual and spiritual detachment the poems strive to overcome. Much has been made by reviewers through the years of Williams's essential coldness and remove. "Frequently he gives us not the sun but the sundial registering it," Richard Eder wrote in his New York Times review of "Collected Poems." It was an effect of which Williams himself was well aware, but he saw as fundamental to "the right," as he put it, "to find manifestations in oneself of love (and so of poetry, which is love) in what are apparently evidences of its opposite: coolness, neglect, indifference, stubbornness, even (well-examined) rage." Perhaps because an unbridgeable distance - which for Williams was the paradox of love - is intrinsic to relations between the human world and nature, some of the strongest pieces in the new collection take animals and insects as their subjects. In "Dominion: Depression," the sexual congress of locusts transmogrifies into a symbol of the carnage and ultimate meaninglessness of death; in "Chaos," a dream about a beetle being eaten by a spider maps onto an uncomfortable allegory of humanity's susceptibility to manipulation; and in "At What Time on the Sabbath Do Vultures Awake?" the speaker observes as the birds descend upon their territory, projecting onto them his own duplicity and need: and then as the light in the dearest distance brightens and moves down over the hillsides bedazzled with late autumn hues and the new winter chill becomes something you can almost ingest they clamber onto the carcass to drive the blunt blades of their beaks into the well-softened flesh fully awake now and how be otherwise on a day portending such glorious craving and fulfillment? For most of his writing life, Williams's work was synonymous with his signature long lines, which he started practicing in earnest in "With Ignorance" (1977), his third full-length collection. Though his subject matter could be pedestrian and at times vulgar, his lines were unfailingly elegant and decorous. Reading them, one would be left with the impression of a writer so spiritually off-balance that he had no other choice but to extend his lyric syntax like a rope to an eternity to which he tried - sometimes comically and other times tragically - to cross. "Often I have thought that after my death, not in death's void as we usually think it,/but in some simpler after-realm of the mind, it will be given to me to transport myself/through all space and all history," he writes in "Realms." The poem "My Fly," an elegy for the sociologist Erving Goffman, begins: "One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly generated from fresh excrement/and who maneuver through our airspace with a deft intentionality that makes them seem to think." Perhaps unexpectedly, in light of his lifetime commitment to the longer line, the strongest poems in the collection are the leaner, lyric, short-lined poems like "After Auschwitz" and "Invisible Mending" (from "Repair") and "Marina" (from "Wait"). Musical, clean and heart-rendingly removed, these poems exist in dialogue with the work in Williams's first two collections, "Lies" (1969) and "I Am the Bitter Name" (1972). "After Auschwitz," in particular, speaks directly and touchingly to Williams's early major poem "A Day for Anne Frank." While the former is resigned - detached from the apparently inevitable injustice of history - the latter is passionate and pitched in disbelief. "The grounds for our despair are compelling, our sense of impotence and hopelessness insidious and debilitating," Williams wrote in an essay. "But what is asked of us then is a greater consciousness of our plight, for human history is, finally, consciousness." Williams seemed most comfortable when in the company of other poets - both the living and the dead whom he admired. Throughout his career he offered catalogs of writers who had inspired him. In the poem "Whacked," included in "Selected Later Poems," he mentions Herbert, Auden and Larkin, among others. Earlier in his career, he wrote that the poets who stayed with him were Baudelaire, Rilke and Yeats. He once wrote an introduction to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet, like him, who was aesthetically devout. Though he doesn't mention them explicitly, his work also seems in dialogue with high modernists like Woolf and Stein (and their postmodern descendants, the poets of the New York School), but only time will tell the sort of company he'll keep. KATY LEDERER is the author of the poetry collections "Winter Sex" and "The Heaven-Sent Leaf," as well as the memoir "Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers."

Williams, winner of all three major U.S. book awards, passed away just as this book hit stores, the latest in a sequence of books seemingly meant to consolidate his legacy. He published his Collected Poems in 2006, the mortality-obsessed Writers Writing Dying in 2012, and an uneven volume of prose poems, All at Once, in 2014. This retrospective rounds up poems from those and four other books published since the late 1990s, as well as a few new poems; these late poems are not unlike the dark, piercing, obsessive, long-lined earlier poems that made him famous, except that death is almost always closing in, the lens through which everything else - sex, family, history, even poetry - is viewed. "Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss?" he writes in "Haste," with an urgency designed to rush past all his inner censors, to get the poem out before it's too late. If some of these lines feel almost dashed off, they are never frivolous. These are some of the finest contemporary poems about the fear of dying and passionate desire for more life: "one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,/ another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was." (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.