Love About Love

C.K. Williams

In Love About Love, C.K. Williams has created a wholly new context for poems written over a lifetime. Culled from all of his previous collections, the poems have been reorganized by the author, sometimes radically, into a sequence that throws startling fresh light on them. With characteristic intensity and directness, Williams explores the many faces of his subject—passion, affection, sexuality, loneliness, jealousy, loss—in poems remarkable for their range and ingenuity. What emerges is a complex and surprising self-portrait-as-lover from earliest childhood longings to the hindsight of mature experience. Love About Love is an unsentimental and unsparing self-assessment by a poet writing at the height of his powers, a vital study of the evolution of a consciousness that is truth-telling, passionate, and profound.

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ISBN: 9780967266831

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9780967266824

Format: Hardcover

Droplets

Even when the rain falls relatively hard,
only one leaf at a time of the little tree
you planted on the balcony last year,
then another leaf at its time, and one more,
is set trembling by the constant droplets,

but the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,
you at the piano inside, your hesitant music
mingling with the din of the downpour,
the gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,
the iron railings and flowing gutters,

all of it fuses in me with such intensity
that I can’t help wondering why my longing
to live forever has so abated that it hardly
comes to me anymore, and never as it did,
as regret for what I might not live to live,

but rather as a layering of intstants like this,
transient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,
yet emphatic as any note of the nocturne
you practice, and, the storm faltering, fading
into its own radiant passing, you practice again.

About the Author

C.K. Williams has published numerous books of poetry, including The Singing, which won the National Book Award, and Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at the University of Pennsylvania. Winner of numerous fellowships and prizes, including the Pushcart Prize, he has also published a book of essays and a memoir. Williams teaches creative writing at Princeton University and lives for part of the year in Paris.

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