A Dream of Mind

by C. K. Williams

Overview

The challenging, exhilarating collection in A Dream of Mind represents an important stage in the evolution of C. K. Williams' work. It is dominated by the long title poem, which explores the materials and qualities of states of consciousness with enormous flexibility and suppleness. Other poems explore jealousy, psychology, family relationships and intellectual constructs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466880580
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/09/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	192 KB

About the Author

C. K. Williams (1936–2015) published twenty-two books of poetry including, Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Singing, winner of the National Book Award. Williams was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. He wrote a critical study, On Whitman; a memoir, Misgivings; and two books of essays, Poetry and Consciousness and In Time: Poets, Poems,and the Rest.
C. K. Williams (1936–2015) published twenty-three books of poetry, including Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Singing, winner of the National Book Award. He lived in New Jersey.

Table of Contents

1
	When	3
	The Vessel	5
	Allies: According to Herodotus	7
	Harm	9
	The Insult	10
	Child Psychology	11
	Chapter Eleven	13
	The Loneliness	15
	Scar	17
2	Some of the Forms of Jealousy
	Signs	21
	The Cautionary	23
	Baby Talk	26
	The Question	28
	Meditation	30
	Politics	31
	Pillow Talk	33
	Ethics	34
	The Mirror	36
	The Call	37
	The Image	39
	The Idyll	41
	The Silence	42
	Soliloquies	44
3
	She, Though	49
4	A Dream of Mind
	The Method	63
	Shadows	65
	Vocations	67
	The Solid	69
	The Charge	71
	The Crime	73
	Shells	74
	Room	75
	History	77
	The Gap	79
	The Knot	81
	The Fear	83
	You	84
	To Listen	85
	The Covenant	87
	Light	89
5
	Helen	93

Editorial Reviews

The voice in the poems of Williams's ( Flesh and Blood ) new collection is one at odds with itself, vacillating between the intense desire to make sense of dreams, jealousies and mortality, yet acknowledging the great difficulty of doing so. In ``Signs,'' a marvelous examination of a man's discovery of a friend's wife's betrayal, the poet is at his best. A master of nuance, and a keen observer of both the traitor and the betrayed, he carries us down the ever-curious, ever-variable paths of jealousy. The shorter poems are timely in their discussions of bankruptcy, religion, betrayal and euthanasia, but Williams is most successful in the longer, subtler narrative poems. The collection concludes with ``Helen,'' which, like this poem's subject, is a ``final, searing loveliness'': in sinewy lines, Williams describes the metamorphosis of a man's fluctuating love for his wife during her terminal illness. Though his dialectics sometimes seem relentless, the poems encompass all that is ``seemingly urgent but possibly purposeless''--the misconstructions, communions and imperfections of life. And Williams is a superb witness: ``I behold the infernal beholder, I behold / the uncanny beheld, / this mind streaming through me, its turbulent stillness.'' (June

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Williams expresses in hard-won and finely tempered verse one of the few truly original voices of this generation. His intelligent, gripping poems weave meditation and narration into long metrical lines, never shying away from complexity in style or story. He has, at least temporarily, abandoned the short stanzaic form showcased in his last collection, National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Flesh and Blood ( LJ 5/1/87), here returning to the longer poems he unreels so well. With room to stretch, he seems more relaxed, making space for every detail, every thought, every observation. A memorable book from one of the finest poets writing today. Highly recommended.-- Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia

Library Journal

[These] poems are nothing if not extreme. Relentless, urban, invasive—like city life itself, they are not for the faint-hearted. One of [Williams's] characteristic strategies is to dramatize the turbulence of the mind at work under terrific duress; that is, in the presence of others at moments of their greatest social weakness and vulunerability, moments when the fabric of daily life is torn open and someone is profoundly exposed . . . 'Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by,' Williams wrote in his essay 'Poetry and Consciousness,' and in A Dream of Mind he has voraciously struggled to clarify that sliding, to unmask what is most painful and hidden in our psyches, and to embody that unmasking in the processes of lyric.” —Edward Hirsch, The New Republic

From the Publisher