A capstone to an unforgettable career Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poetâs task: to record with candor and ardor âthe burden of being alive.â In Falling Ill, his final volume of poems, he brings this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mindâs encounter with the brute fact of the bodyâs decay, the spiritâs erasure. Written with unsparing lyricism and relentless discursive logic, these brave poems face unflinchingly âthe dreadful edge of a precipiceâ 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 loveâs close presence. Here are no easy resolutions, false consolations. Like unanswered prayers, they are poems of deep interrogationâa dialogue between the agonized âIâ in its harrowing here-and-nowness and the elusive âyouâ of the beloved who flickers achingly just out of reach. Williamsâs Falling Ill takes its place among the enduring works of literature about death and departure.
Price history
Oct 25, 2021
€11.53