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Staff Pick
Falling Ill: Last Poems
Current price:
$14.00
This product is not returnable.
Publication Date: January 23rd, 2018
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN:
9780374537531
Pages:
64
Usually Ships in 2 to 5 Days
Staff Reviews
This book is a glimmering trail of the light at the end of the tunnel. Brutally honest, it allows the reader into the mind of a brilliant poet as he was going through the trials of a fatal cancer. The slim volume, coupled with single-page poems in triplets that use no punctuation, and work the caesuras at the end of each line as needed, gives us the sense of wandering in a dark wood, out of time and out of breath, with no guideposts, just as I imagine Williams must have been. A must read.
—
Kim
Description
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.
Praise for Falling Ill: Last Poems
"Falling Ill, if you let it happen, is likely to harrow and haunt you. Like all [Williams's] poetry, it tells the truth as near as it can come . . . [The poems'] lack of punctuation lends them an air of nakedness, vulnerability, terror, tumbling forward . . . Down to its final, unbearable explosion of love, this book holds the wavering mirror steady. Many poets have gone out writing poems, but few have been such a poet." —John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer
