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With his two previous books, a generous Selected Poems and The Vigil, C.K. Williams received major acclaim, including the PEN/Voelcker Award and the prestigious Berlin Prize. Repair represents an extraordinary outpouring of new work: nearly fifty poems, many of them in couplets and quatrains, together with a number of generous longer poems. His subjects, again, are love, death, the secrets kept among intimates, the waywardness of thought, and the violence and metaphoric power of the natural show more 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. show less

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5 reviews
The book contains 40 to 50 poems. About a quarter of them were so prosaic as to not feel like poems. Several of them were very negative, proclaiming the ugliness of life. There were, however, a quarter to a third of them that I found profound and brilliantly expressed.
½
In the midst of the depressing and violence to animals cruelty,
here are the four good poems I would recommend:

ICE, THE TRAIN, THE DRESS, and OWEN: SEVEN DAYS.

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44+ Works 1,195 Members
Charles Kenneth Williams was born on November 4, 1936 in Newark, New Jersey. He received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. His collections of poetry include Lies, The Last Deaths, Collected Poems, and Selected Later Poems. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987 for Flesh and Blood, the show more Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Repair in 2000, and the National Book Award for The Singing in 2003. In addition to writing poetry, he translated plays by Sophocles and poems by Adam Zagajewski and Francis Ponge. His critical essays were collected in Poetry and Consciousness and In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest. He also wrote On Whitman and a memoir entitled Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself. He taught in Princeton University's creative writing program from 1996 until shortly before his death. He died from multiple myeloma on September 20, 2015 at the age of 78. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Classifications

Genres
Poetry, Fiction and Literature
DDC/MDS
811.54Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican poetry20th Century1945-1999
LCC
PS3573 .I4483 .R46Language and LiteratureAmerican literatureAmerican literatureIndividual authors1961-
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Members
193
Popularity
169,049
Reviews
3
Rating
(3.77)
Languages
English
Media
Paper, Ebook
ISBNs
4
ASINs
2