Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and
numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished
poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and
the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as
resonant as war, social injustice, love, family, sex, death, depression,
and intellectual despair and delight. He is also a gifted essayist, and
In Time collects his best recent prose along with an illuminating
series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of
subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the current
state of American poetry as a whole. In Time begins with six essays
that meditate on poetic subjects, from reflections on such forebears as
Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell to "A Letter to a Workshop," in which he
considers the work of composing a poem. In the book's innovative middle
section, Williams extracts short essays from interviews into an
alphabetized series of reflections on subjects ranging from poetry and
politics to personal accounts of his own struggles as an artist. The
seven essays of the final section branch into more public concerns,
including an essay on Paris as a place of inspiration, "Letter to a
German Friend," which addresses the issue of national guilt, and a
concluding essay on aging, into which Williams incorporates three moving
new poems. Written in his lucid, powerful, and accessible prose,
Williams's essays are characterized by reasoned and complex judgments
and a willingness to confront hard moral questions in both art and
politics. Wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful, In Time is the
culmination of a lifetime of reading and writing by a man whose work has
made a substantial contribution to contemporary American poetry.
