The Singing

"There are masterful poems in this book . . . Williams's ability to describe continues to be extraordinary and so is his gift for telling a story."—Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books

"The poems in Williams's stunning new collection, The Singing, have a new density and clarity. They are clear about complex things, which one sees as slightly magnified, like pebbles on the bed of a very clear stream. Williams now realizes more than ever that 'your truths will seek you, though you still / must construct and comprehend them.' He succeeds at this task with a flair that tempers the regret that is the recurring note in these poems, and transforms it into something like joy."—John Ashbery

"Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Williams has written, 'Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.' This crucial observation can be read as Williams' creative credo, because he has taken as his mission the articulation of those aspects of life that haunt and plague us the most: lost love, brute aggression, hate, and death. Williams dissects and ponders these dark mysteries within the contexts of life's implacable organic imperatives and history's compelling yet ineffectual cautionary tales, thus breaking through the isolation and despair contemplation of harsh realities can engender. Hope resides in the forging of such philosophical connections and in the perspective they provide, and there is joy, too, in experiencing Williams's candor and command of language and imagery. This is an altogether transfixing and cathartically probing collection, but it reaches its highest peaks in a set of poems in which Williams offers deep and anchoring insights into the time of war that began on September 11, 2001, and in the ravishingly beautiful cycle 'Elegy to an Artist,' a tribute to friendship and ringing testimony to the radiance of the human spirit and the consolation of art."—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)