Publisher's Synopsis
C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language, which The Vigil brought to a new pitch of intensity. There are poems of love and grief, poems of history and of social and political despair and hope, and a series of shorter poems, Symbols, which incorporate an almost Rilkean metaphoric force to delineate fugitive emotional and intellectual experience. The tragedy of existence, Williams writes, is 'to come so close to a life and not comprehend it, acknowledge it, truly know it is life'. In The Vigil, however, Williams achieves a kind of comprehension, and shares it with the reader, through the way of knowing that is poetry. The Vigil was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
