The Vigil: Poems

Over three decades, C. K. Williams has claimed as his own a world of startling anecdotes and complex inner states, rendered in precise, daring language. The Vigil -- which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and, in the United Kingdom, the Forward Prize -- brings Williams's poetry to a new pitch of intensity. The poems have become more condensed and more intensely lyrical, and while the broad range of themes and concerns evident in his Selected Poems has not been slighted -- there are poems for departed family and friends. Love poems, poems of history and of social and political despair and hope, and frankly symbolic short poems -- they have become even more sharply observed and dramatic. The Vigil is C. K. Williams most powerful book to date.