James Tate was a hit-and-miss poet—as well as a miss-and-miss-and-miss poet. His batting average would never have gotten him out of the minor leagues; but baseball is a percentage game, and poetry not. One poem like Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” will drag you into anthologies forever, no matter how dull your other poems.

Tate’s method—type one line, later another, later still another, until he found the poem finished—does not recommend itself. Such a strategy requires an arrogance or insecurity that makes it difficult to forgive his weak poems and easy to distrust his best, however astonishing, loopy, and unlike anyone else’s. To write like Tate, you had to be Tate, which is not the same as saying that to write like Auden you had to be Auden, though both had imitators never as successful as their models. Some styles are beyond imitation.

Tate did not believe in revision, apparently; and poets who don’t trust revision are either lucky geniuses or unlucky also-rans. (Whether the poet was kidding about his typewriter Ouija board, only his rough drafts may show.) The method, then, was probably at fault for the startling number of duff poems. The poet’s early books were giddy, a goofball poet doing goofball things; but he couldn’t sustain such innocence. As with most styles, after two or three books a bit of rot set in; and the lightness of his first poems became rare, though never vanishing entirely. Curiously, the depth in his most resonant work, like the title poem of The Lost Pilot (1966), chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, was hardly ever seen again.

A poet who succumbs to reckless winsomeness is always skating on thin ice. Tate’s most insubstantial pieces were disasters of self-imitation. Still, it’s hard not to be charmed by “Goodtime Jesus,” which begins, “Jesus got up one day later than usual,” or the opening of “My Great Great Etc. Uncle Patrick Henry”:

There’s a fortune to be made in just about everything

in this country, somebody’s father had to invent

everything—baby food, tractors, rat poisoning.

My family’s obviously done nothing since the beginning

of time. They invented poverty and bad taste

and getting by and taking it from the boss.

“I could go on like this,” he says in one poem; and all too frequently he does. Tate had the courage of his oddity, a decent kind of courage for a poet. Rare, too. He creates an attitude, the ghost of personality; yet he remains a stranger, not incapable of being, just refusing to be known. If there were confessions in his work, they were buried deep.

Tate was often compared to John Ashbery, to whom he was only a second cousin twice removed. Ashbery could be silly; but he was far more protean and suggestive, always on the verge of Wittgensteinian aphorism or some sleight of hand like Schrödinger’s kitty, that kneeslapper worth the Nobel Prize. Tate scarcely gets past just fooling around. He was a wisecracker with an occasional darkness—the banter conceals a lot more than it reveals, like his long struggle with alcohol. Unfortunately, being an original can be more burden than blessing, if you have to be on all the time. At readings, Tate giggled at his own jokes.

A dozen pages into this selection, it’s obvious how little the straitjacket of manner allowed him to do. Even so, “Neighbors” starts with a blizzard of questions, as if posed by a crazed census-taker, then deepens into the profound through the seemingly superficial:

They are certainly cordial to us, painfully

polite when we chance-encounter one another at the roadside

mailboxes—but then, like opposite magnets, we lunge backward,

back into our own deep root systems, darkness and lust

strangling any living thing to quench our thirst and nourish

our helplessly solitary lives.

This book’s “essential” selection, thinner than a calling-card case, includes strange and unlikely poems like “The Promotion,” “How the Pope Is Chosen,” “The Rules,” “The Painter of the Night,” “I Am a Finn,” “The Ice Cream Man,” “The War Next Door,” and others that reset the boundaries of what contemporary poems could do.

A thinned-down Tate was a good idea, as so many of his exercises in willful misadventure don’t bear reprinting. His more palsied whims lack his essential whimsy. Unfortunately, three editors were required to construct this short book, and the note by the head editor Dara Barrois/Dixon thanks seven other friends who contributed. The result betrays the obvious problems of editing by committee, which took three years to shrink a list of 180 poems to ninety, and at last to fifty-two, all for an “intimate” book that leaves out some of Tate’s most original work and includes a basketful of clunkers. Later poems are mixed with earlier, “The Lost Pilot” coming nearly at the end. The title of the selection, Hell, I Love Everybody, is an inside joke—Tate gave the line to Jesus.1 Barrois/Dixon writes, less than compellingly, “To everyone who reaches for poetry for their own reasons, this book is dedicated to you.” Nowhere, at least in the advanced copy, is it mentioned that Tate died in 2015. The poet would have been amused by that.

Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature seven years ago, has written a book of song lyrics, The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, that looks more like a graphic novel—the pages of art far outnumber those devoted to the lyrics.2 (The spiffy illustrations are the work of the Italian cartoonist Bianca Bagnarelli.) The songs were composed for Stacey Kent, whose wispy voice can turn sharp as a razor blade or throaty as a garbage disposal. I’d be the last to say a novelist shouldn’t practice a second art; but writers are rarely as good at their side hustle, even if that came first. No one reads Faulkner’s poems now, and Joyce’s have only a tenuous hold on English literature.

Ishiguro understands all too well, as he admits in his tedious introduction, the problem of publishing lyrics naked, without what makes songs songs, namely the music. Some lyrics can stand alone without mortal loss (Johnny Cash’s, for instance), but they’re still not a patch on the songs when sung. Blues suffer the least. Ishiguro’s lyrics tend to be innocuous, prose-heavy, fixated like many songs on musty sorrow and dusty memories. The mood is sentimental, the rhymes strained or iffy: “I want to sit in my shades, sipping my latte/ Beneath the awning of a famous café/ Jet-lagged and with our luggage gone astray.” (I assume, despite the parsimonious punctuation, that the café’s not jet-lagged.)

Song lyrics often succeed despite slapdash rhymes; but, fixed to the page, these lyrics suffer when you marry “balcony” to “comedy”—or “pleasing” and “reason” to “horizon” and “season.” Clunky would be the kindest way to describe them. The banal lines are almost completely unmemorable:

You leaned towards your window

To see the traffic up ahead

“These commuters here,” you said

“Could be the walking dead”

And we vowed to guard our dreams

From all the storms that lay ahead

From the winds of fear and age and compromise

The “walking dead” line might have worked better had the long-running television show not already claimed it. (The phrase, as “walking dead-man,” goes back to the seventeenth century.)

Ishiguro’s lyrics are narratives, often enough; but they move with the sluggishness of a Venetian canal. Even if you can put up with the purple passages, the constant longing to relive the past, his slightly slipshod grammar and sheer wordiness get in the way. Consider “It went so against my tested system/ So against the roll of my weighted dice/ To lose my heart to my intended victim/ And to gamble on paradise.” Wouldn’t that have been stronger as “It went against my system/ Against the weighted dice/ To lose to one more victim/ Gambling on paradise”?

The songs have all been posted on the web, for anyone who cares to listen. Can even Stacey Kent make something of such fragile, osteoporotic lines? A little, certainly—but there’s no depth in the lines for her to explore. With a noodling accompaniment on electric piano, the songs sound like a night in a haunted jazz-bar. Those backed by a full orchestra fare even worse.

Saskia Hamilton, who died of cancer last summer at the age of fifty-six, was best known as the editor of, among other volumes, The Letters of Robert Lowell; The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle; and (with Thomas Travisano) Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. If her poems were less impressive, their distinctions less evident, they display a pencil-sharp intellect, thinking more strongly than they feel.

All Souls is lush with gorgeous imagery (“the black foam of the newspapers, urns of ashes in the burned garden, owl’s puzzles in the night”) and long passages of astringent beauty:

Late in the season, eating a pear

that is the memory of a pear,

silvery, dunked in frigid waters

by the orchard keepers for transport,

mealy now, late season, fragrant

of September and sun.3

That’s from the title poem, cast in sections of prosy prose; but the parts never add up to wholes. The loveliness and intellectual rigor aren’t brought to fruition—the segments seem mere sketches, notes from some urtext now lost.

Hamilton was better than almost any of her peers at philosophical maundering (“According to Kant, we are compelled to bring a form of structuring activity to experience. . . . [S]tructure of any kind is a form of thought, even counting.”) The fragmented gestures reflect her experience of fatal illness. Being trapped in the “long cigar tube of the pet scan machine” may make anyone claustrophobic, eager for distraction. (I find that CDs of Chicago blues help, especially those by Howlin’ Wolf and Hound Dog Taylor.) The shards of which these poems are composed shut out the pain of experience, intellectualizing even the attendant emotion, never coming into their own.

What seem drafts for unwritten poems are often killingly dull, as if the language of feeling had gradually drifted out of reach or simply been banned at the outset. I’m moved by the poet’s insistence on her concealed pain and revealed mortality, but the jottings beg for connection. The anecdotal sections of the title poem demonstrate how strong Hamilton’s work could be when, rather than lecturing, she turns to the cost others have suffered. A woman nursing men wounded during the Battle of Arnhem (part of Operation Market Garden) gives them currant juice and readings from the Psalms. She retreats to the cellar, where she has stashed her children:

“What a long time you have been away,”

her daughter said, and asked for her doll’s

white linen. Again she climbed the stairs

and at the top she found “a whole piece

of the wall under the window . . .

blown away,” the wounded with it.

A poet capable of such moments was not inadequate when facing emotion; she merely chose not to focus on these things in herself.

Sickness or the nearness of death rarely concentrates the mind—more often it befogs whatever clarity has not already vanished in sanitized hospital-rooms: “no/ one finds being the third person/ becoming, it’s never accurate,/ and then one is headed for the past tense.” When Hamilton’s poems remove themselves from that whitewashed realm, they live in a world, however cruel, worth living in, a past that may encompass pain but does not deny it. A boy and his friend, after the end of World War II, play near what was once a minefield:

They found the tree to climb

and then jumped down this time

onto a mine that had once—though the field

had been swept, they all thought—been laid there

by an unfortunate hand. For sixty years,

his face looks up from picture frames

in the houses of their friends. She kept

in her clothes a piece of his skull,

and her thumb would stroke it,

as she had once stroked the fontanel.

The seventeenth-century tinge of the “unfortunate hand” shows off the poet’s subtle learning. (The phrase can be found in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Love’s Cure.) She was a poet of depths she never had time to explore.

There’s not much poetry in this posthumous collection, merely gestures of loss, prosaic when not sheer prose. The rest consists of quotation, vignettes, and a smattering of insightful lit-crit on Donne, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and T. S. Eliot. The book can’t quite decide what it wants to be, so it ends up more none than all. In the acknowledgments, Hamilton thanks nearly a hundred and fifty people by name, some of them twice. If there’s scarcely a real poem here, stuffed as the book is with notions intriguing but abandoned, with an earned willfulness that cannot replace what’s missing, she created a world where absence became its own brand of presence.

Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor is one of the finest debuts in recent memory.4 There have been very few Irish poets in the past half-century who could be compared to Seamus Heaney. Michael Longley and the late Derek Mahon were both substantial poets of Heaney’s generation, but no one ever thought them a fair match for the man himself. Ryan, however, conjures up that extraordinary ghost, though the ghost has him by the scruff of the neck. The younger poet is brave with syntax, perhaps even foolhardy, and loves to complicate description, as if he were making scribbled sketches toward some finished work—but the scribbles are the finished work:

A lookout on the world: next door’s wisteria,

its purple leaching out, half hides

a railing that needs paint;

nine wooden planks, enough to stand on.

My freedom as a “free lance.”

An interstitial age. Hardly neighbourly,

I know fewer names than the years

I’ve been here. Rows of identikit suvs

line the road in lieu of trees

I’ve seen cut back, then down.

These lines open the book’s first poem. Such description might be called crunchy, toothsome as a day-old biscuit. Ryan’s in love with dashes and semicolons (as, I confess, am I) and is willing to work the edges of a subject until the poem finds itself. He doesn’t milk his endings—he simply arrives there and takes his leave. Many readers may find this work difficult, or not worth the trouble, though as with Heaney it’s layered, sometimes furtive, but almost always in control.

Ryan is a champion noticer, especially of the minor lives that form society. Little seems lost on him:

Later on, he wouldn’t cut his nails, wash his clothes—

but that was down the road, that brand of sadness a hint

in the air, like the fate of apples coming into season

that will perish uneaten in their bowl. His voice

the note of goodness in the fruit, of England

lurching into colour, the trees of the forest bending their heads

like angels out of Blake.

His ability to change direction midair, or midstream, may seem overly acrobatic. If that’s the cost of this acute vision, staring at the daily grind through a magnifying glass, it’s a small price. Something tortured has been unleashed here; if a poem stumbles or overreaches, too wild in manner or method, the world is too much with his work to control an imagination raging with excess. It’s far better to let inspiration roam like a savage beast before you try to tame it. Being bullheaded is not the worst defect in a poet—just lack of talent.

Ryan turned forty last year, so technically he’s no longer a young poet; but his poems have the raw, ragged energy we expect from the young. Consider what he fashions out of little more than detritus:

the newly built bus garage a staging post or track meet for grudge matches,

mostly settled by evening, in time for the council tax-payers

to make landfall: a residual rusty bloodstain or two, the perennial floral tributes

and cardboard signs, felt-tip and text-speak, more fallen soldiers to be put away.

The poem goes on for ten stanzas without taking a breath. It’s like the mad HO model-train set I once saw in a shop in my Florida town, where the engines looped crazily round and round on tracks that burst through rough-hewn tunnels high up in the walls. I’ve long forgotten what was sold there; but the idea that someone would bore holes into lath and plaster to make a miniature world all the truer by being more fantastic—that’s what Ryan does here.

His most convincing poems don’t unfold so much as tumble downhill at speed, velocity coming at the cost of lack of structure, an inability to make syntax serve as the slalom gates to make weaving down an icy slope into art. He has other flaws—he can’t let a sentence go without unnecessary phrases that leave meaning behind, and sometimes the poems have no interior or core. Many recount celebrated boxing matches, among them Joe Louis vs. Primo Carnera, Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman, Mike Tyson vs. Trevor Berbick, Tyson vs. Buster Douglas. It’s a daisy chain of world-class boxers and one or two thugs; but the reader never understands why Ryan adores the subject—the matches are recounted, if not blow by blow, then in a beat reporter’s style that never explains this love for the ring, the gladiator’s modern amphitheater and ground zero for brain damage.

Ryan’s poems do have a pugilistic touch, not just in the way some swing wildly without landing more than a good thwack or two. (His name is an anagram of “Cannery Lad,” a good nom de guerre for the fight game.) In any case, the poet’s a better jabber than a puncher. In boxing, one good shot can end a match—it’s not quite that way in poetry. If too many poems here are just a mine tailing of phrases, if some metaphors seem wildly off-kilter (“We who sat at your table were lucky,/ taking our anonymous, instantly recognisable, turns/ out of the ancient envelope”) that’s another byproduct of the speed at which his invention works. “Manic hyperactivity” is one of his phrases; if he wore a boxer’s robe, that would be stitched on the back.

Though he doesn’t have Heaney’s control or sublime artfulness, the poems show the power of subtlety and rage. If some lack a center, and others feel like punishments; if some still require tempering; if you finish the book and then immediately have at it again, well, give Declan Ryan a champion’s belt and send him back to training camp for the next match.

Dressed all in black, with plucked eyebrows and a come-hither glance or go-thither glare, V. R. “Bunny” Lang could have passed as a standard Fifties vamp—think of Kim Novak slinking through Bell, Book, and Candle. A Boston debutante coming from old money and a massive brick row-house on the Charles, Lang enrolled in college but soon dropped out. In the Forties, she moved through the damp sub-basements of Beantown, odd-jobbing her way (“bridal consultant” for a famous portrait-studio, burlesque dancer), by the Fifties mingling with the artsy crowd at Harvard, including Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Harold Brodkey, Edward Gorey, Alison Lurie, Donald Hall, and Gregory Corso—the last a non-matriculating student usually found in the library. Lang was bossy and imperious, attention-seeking and -getting, lending herself to poetry and plays without much success, apart from helping to found the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge. O’Hara dedicated a number of poems to her, and in many ways she was the muse of the New York School before the school opened its doors.

After Lang’s death at thirty-two from Hodgkin lymphoma, she became one of those marginal figures early death transformed. Half a dozen years later, her husband self-published a selection of her work with a typically mysterious cover by Gorey. Lurie became one of her posthumous champions, in 1975 marrying to the poems and plays her previously published memoir of Lang. The volume received mostly negative reviews. The Miraculous Season is the latest attempt to create an audience for this slight figure, who has already received more attention than her due.5 The editor, Rosa Campbell, has worked from Lang’s drafts, now at Harvard, keeping some of the quirks that make a marginal figure marginal, like her spellings “eachother” and “icecream.”

Most of Lang’s poems consist of a “poetic” sensibility that never quite amounts to poetry: “Lately by language,/ What broke I wonder, some heat I touched by,/ Some stealing summer where // Greens overwhelmed the fall.” This almost comes into its own, shifting between striking phrases and a slurry of words. It’s hard to tell the good from the bad in her work, because the good is amateurish and the bad just sludge.

I waited all that time for a bird I wanted.

In a bucket of limestone. Taking form

Like a diamond only a little more lively

The zone was horror. I stayed within the bounds.

It took place like five hundred centuries

Barely heaving.

The lines often appear to be torn-up fragments of diaries or punch-drunk letters. More attention to punctuation might have helped, though not much. Lang can go in an instant from the striking idea to mere nonsense (“Light knows something it can’t tell:/ Stones see back./ Hurry, hurry, harries the cat-call,/ Prize the temeritous well!”) or write lines Tolkien somehow misplaced (“like mountains/ Shuddering to grow in the millions of long time/ Squashed in the heart of us surely there are footsteps/ Of the flying land giants and the walking dragon lords”). This selection isn’t helped by the sloppy editing that gives us “realler,” “stare at the celling,” “eldues” for “eludes,” and “leamed” for “learned.”

Lang had brains and an overweening personality that was ridiculous, vengeful, and mean. Poets have made more from less. She rarely found a language worthy of her overactive imagination and didn’t know how to structure it on the few occasions she did. Simpler, like some of the best O’Hara, would have been better. Sometimes she just spews onto the page like a broken fire-hydrant (“excuses, excuses/ shrimp pink and rotten veal/ where my cadaver/ lies sleeping/ lily or/ carnivore”). There are wonderful lines here and there, promising poems that never find their way, and far too many pages filled with half- or quarter-thoughts that amount to blithering:

But had we seen our child take aim we surely should have stopped him,

Who severed murdered head from neck by sprung cork from a pop-gun.

Oh when we knew, we flew, we flew to him with pity in our eyes,

To find he was not real at all, but bound to joint by wires!

He was our blood, how could we know he was a dummy?

No blood of ours before has been a dummy!

I admire this for sheer gonzo nuttiness, but that doesn’t make it any good. I’m drawn to many poems for their opening lines but then lose heart, as in “Death of Another Swan—Miami 1953”:

To die out of debt was a last stand, but

Somewhere the outpost of a father in Tucson

Blind, angry, married to the kitchen radio

And the gossipy neighbors who would have

caught the post.

The last two lines would have made a great elevator-pitch for a Fifties sitcom, but the poem soon rambles toward Nothingville. The gods gave Lang many things, but a skill for editing was not among them. The occasional good lines are like an oasis in the Sahara that turns out to be a mirage. If adhd wrote poems, they’d look like these.

Many poets have had short lives and left lasting work (Keats, Shelley, Hart Crane, and Plath, for instance); but I suspect that Lang, like many artists, grew used to being worshipped by her friends while trading in nothing but force of personality. Her work required too much theater, too much stage makeup. The unfinished quality of her poems seems a sad necessity.

The New York School has suffered a long fall, now remembered mostly for the brilliant success of Ashbery and the half dozen or so striking poems by O’Hara, like “The Day Lady Died” and “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed!].” Scarcely anyone reads Corso, James Schuyler, or Kenneth Koch anymore, and poetry is probably the blander for that. Lang jazzed things up for her friends, a classic high-voltage muse eager to be the life of the party. The editor deserves praise for this fresh attempt to make the case for Lang’s woebegone work, but not even what Rosa Campbell calls her obsession with the poet can make the poems worth reading.

Of the poets who have answered the call of Walt Whitman, C. K. Williams came closest to doing something beyond style with the American tongue Whitman took for his own. The Beats seem sidetracked in their brief American moment—“Howl” is almost unreadable now; and beyond “Kaddish” and “A Supermarket in California” there’s little in Ginsberg that makes you long for deep acquaintance. Williams, though fussier, more frustrating, more academic (he taught for two decades at Princeton), made the long line and parallel phrasing his own.

The poet’s early books were clumsy and inconsequential. There was little to suggest his later talents, apart from “A Day for Anne Frank,” which gets more disturbing with each reading. Only in With Ignorance (1977), his third book, did the poet’s lines, longer than a tape measure, become more offhand, letting sentences spill over like boiling water from a pot.

A whole section of the city I live in has been urban renewed, some of it torn down,

some restored to what it was supposed to have been a few hundred years ago.

Once you could’ve walked blocks without hearing English, now the ghettos have been cleared,

there are parks and walkways and the houses

are all owned by people who’ve moved back from the suburbs.

There was often sentiment at the margins, a feverish faux naïveté, and the sort of free association you’d pay good money to be free from. When you begin to think your goal is to include everything, no matter how banal or dispiritingly dull, your poems are not-so-subtle forms of torment, or vengeance.

Williams soon realized that he was a narrative poet who didn’t have the inclination, or the chops, to write novels or short stories. However ungoverned and self-indulgent the elephantine lines seem now, at the time they released an onrush of spirit and self-examination quite different from what the confessional poets had done. (Williams’s inventive work came after the deaths of Plath, Berryman, and Lowell.)

The poet was perhaps most engaged when most willing to shock, as in a poem about an SS officer who forces a rabbi to spit on the Torah; but his real gift was for long poems about longing, about denial, about all the psychology behind the trivia of everyday life. On sex he seemed to be auditioning for a monthly column in Playboy.

But still, if there were a moment, still, one moment, to begin in or go back to,

to return to move through, waver through, only a single moment carved back from the lie

the way the breast is carved from its shadow, sealed from the dross of darkness

until it takes the darkness itself and fills with

it . . .

The poem goes on for nine pages! A good deal of Williams’s work was similarly self-flagellating, full of regret and pain. He recorded little twinges of ideas with an obsessiveness like a lingering case of beriberi. Some poems became three or four times as long as they should have been, living on their own wastage. I’m not sure being called the “Fellini of the written word,” as Williams was by Anne Sexton, was healthy for him. His poetry, when it works, requires almost infinite complication in search of a truth that never quite arrives. Overdoing became his only way of doing. You almost have to take his poems at speed—otherwise, you feel like a fly caught in a flytrap.

After a while, Williams couldn’t just tell you a story without telling you he was telling it. He invested poetry with new levels of tedium. And yet. And yet. Though too many poems overstayed their welcome, and others were strangled by their python-like lines, there was an agreeable madness to his method, a Freudian mania to get down on paper every variation of memory. (The talking cure is also a form of torture.) From Flesh and Blood (1987) onward, the poems are more controlled and at least sometimes much shorter. A poem about a woman with an artificial hand proved how easily he could court disgust and then slither past it. A poet who embraced the darkness, even in himself, he became much more fraught and insightful about sex than the pop-siren Sharon Olds. The poems grew disturbing with ambiguity:

Next to his open locker, a ragged equipment bag, on top a paperback: The Ethical System of Hume.

The smell of wintergreen and steam-room

steam; from the swimming pool echoes of children screaming.

The subjects Williams chose were often curious, or distressingly off-kilter, from Three-Mile Island to making out with the daughter of a German general who’d conspired against Hitler, from a girl paralyzed in a gang fight to the domestic use of an ice pick. There’s even a long poem on a boy’s sneakers. Though nothing human was alien to him, all the nattering could get on your nerves. He’d spend a whole page describing how a young father (with a “little Rasta-beard”) picks up his toddler, who has fallen down a playground slide. Williams had a firm grasp on the psychology of tiny moments, but his off-switch rarely worked. He almost never ended a poem too soon.

Despite too many long-winded poems with a short attention span, his most exquisite pieces remain irritating, hypnotic, estranged from the poetry of the day. His poem on visiting Auschwitz makes me shudder. Though even in his best work phrase follows phrase like an angry row of ants, what was soiled in his imagination may be his saving grace. Williams was neither a great nor a terrible poet—he suffered aspects of both. He’d have made a hell of a psychiatrist, could he have learned to listen.

Williams died in 2015 at the age of seventy-eight. His final books have been whittled almost to nothing in this selected poems, Invisible Mending: The Best of C. K. Williams, as if the unnamed editors had gotten sick of the whole business.6 If you read one or two poems, you think you might fall in love; if you read a dozen in a row, you just want to tell him to shut the hell up.