Sophocles

C. K. Williams

Gregory Weimer Dickerson

Mutability; uncertainty; a universe of precipitous change: these themes are at the heart of Sophocles' tragic vision. But nowhere are they elaborated with more urgency than in Women of Trachis. There are no subtle shifts of Fortune's favors in this tragedy, only stunning and total reversals, a relentless spinning of her fickle wheel. Thesis moves to crushing antithesis with an unparalleled violence at the moment of transformation. Thought to have been written about 440 BC, midway through the poet's career, Women of Trachis has long suffered from neglect by scholars despite its sophistication and raw energy. This translation at last rescues the immense lyrical power and tragic grandeur of the play from obscurity, restoring the music of a poetry originally meant to be sung and danced collectively.

Women of Trachis

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets "Always, "These gigantic inconceivables." Always, "What will have been done to me?" And so we don our mental armor, flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should. A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk, though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?" --from "Risk" Repair is body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence." Repair is a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Poems

Repair

For his Selected Poems, C. K. Williams has chosen from three decades of his work to represent every aspect of his marvelous career.

Selected Poems

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Selected Later Poems

In his first book of poetry since Repair, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, C. K. Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity-the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events-with an intensity and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago. He gazes at a Rembrandt self-portrait, and from it fashions a self-portrait of his own. He ponders an "anatomical effigy" at the Museum of Mankind, and in so doing "dissects" our common humanity. Stoking a fire at a house in the country, he recalls a friend who was burned horribly in war, and then turns, with eloquence and authority, to contemporary life during wartime, asking "how those with power over us can effect such things, and by what cynical reasoning pardon themselves." The Singing is a direct and resonant book: tough, searching, heartfelt, permanent. New work from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Repair, reality has put itself so solidly before me there's little need for mystery, except for us, for how we take the world to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself-from "The World". In his first volume since Repair, C. K. Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity-the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events-with an intensity and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago.

The Singing

Short, sharp musings on things profound and mundane (and sometimes both) from the Pulitzer Prize winning poet C. K. Williams has never been afraid to push the boundaries of poetic form—in fact, he's known for it, with long, lyrical lines that compel, enthrall, and ensnare. In his latest work, All at Once, Williams again embodies this spirit of experimentation, carving out fresh spaces for himself and surprising his readers once more with inventions both formal and lyrical. Somewhere between prose poems, short stories, and personal essays, the musings in this collection are profound, personal, witty, and inventive—sometimes all at once. Here are the starkly beautiful images that also pepper his poems: a neighbor's white butane tank in March "glares in the sunlight, raw and unseemly, like a breast inappropriately unclothed in the painful chill." Here are the tender, masterful sketches of characters Williams has encountered: a sign painter and skid-row denizen who makes an impression on the young soon-to-be poet with his "terrific focus, an intensity I'd never seen in an adult before." And here are a husband's hymns to his beloved wife, to her laughter, which "always has something keen and sweet to it, an edge of something like song." This is a book that provokes pathos and thought, that inspires sympathy and contemplation. It is both fiercely representative of Williams's work and like nothing he's written before—a collection to be admired, celebrated, and above all read again and again.

Prose Poems

All at Once

The eighth book--and the most various yet--by a major American poet. With his two previous books, a generous Selected Poems and The Vigil, C. K. Williams received great acclaim, including the PEN/Voelcker Award and the prestigious Berlin Prize. Repair represents an extraordinary outpouring of nearly fifty new poems. His subjects, again, are love, death, secrets among intimates, the waywardness of thought, and the violence and metaphoric power of the natural world. A long poem about the sixties, "King," broods over the mixed motives and misunderstandings of the period; the final poem defines, and in its way celebrates, the "invisible mending" of time and attentiveness to the thing itself. Here is a poet in full maturity, his mastery transforming everything he touches. Repair is a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The challenging, exhilarating collection in A Dream of Mind represents an important stage in the evolution of C. K. Williams' work. It is dominated by the long title poem, which explores the materials and qualities of states of consciousness with enormous flexibility and suppleness. Other poems explore jealousy, psychology, family relationships and intellectual constructs.

A Dream of Mind

A capstone to an unforgettable career;  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, they 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.

Falling ill

Collected poems, 1963-2006

Euripides

From the renowned contemporary American poet C. K. Williams comes this fluent and accessible version of the great tragedy by Euripides. This book includes an introduction by Martha Nussbaum.

The Bacchae of Euripides

In this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it—to explore why Whitman's epic "continues to inspire and sometimes daunt" him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.

On Whitman

I am the reason girls are told not to trust strangers. I am their cautionary tale.

Flowers for the Dead

The Nobble lives in a world all his own--a fantastical world where you can do the impossible things of dreams. It's a nice life and all he's ever known. Yet one day he begins to think about finding some place he hasn't been yet. Or maybe seeing something he hasn't seen yet. Or . . . "something." So he sets off on a journey to an unusual place, where he discovers roary things, fuzzy things, and tall, shiny, rectangular things. Then a door knocks. If only he knew what a door was . . . C. K. Williams and Stephen Gammell's enchanting tale is about finding the courage to go out and search for what you want most in the world. And sometimes, that's a friend.

How the Nobble Was Finally Found

A boy walks through a forest full of snakes and wolves and bears, but this boy isn't afraid because he knows they'll stay out of his way. The scary monster in this forest won't stay out of his way, though. He pops out at the boy and growls! But the brave boy just keeps walking along because he doesn't believe in monsters. This sets the monster to begging and begging for the boy to believe in him, even just a smidge. Will the boy ever agree?This unusual monster story, with thrills and fangs and growls, shows that a little confidence and a lot of courage can shrink fears to a size that might even be a little cuddly.

A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things

James Havard

Julie Sasse

This publication, the first extensive monograph of James Harvard's work, focuses on the past two decades of his oeuvre, including painting, sculpture, and prints. It includes more than 120 color plates and illuminating texts that describe his process and artistic development, and that situate this body of work in the context of the artist's life as well as his art historical influences. A full, illustrated chronology and documentation of his career complete this comprehensive tome.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐’Well this book blew my mind! What a delicious plot twist. One of the best psychological thrillers I have read in a very long time’ Michelle, reader review

Local Whispers

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams's personal reflection on the art of Walt Whitman In this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it—to explore why Whitman's epic "continues to inspire and sometimes daunt" him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.

C. K. Williams

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