Selected Later Poems

Williams, winner of all three major U.S. book awards, passed away just as this book hit stores, the latest in a sequence of books seemingly meant to consolidate his legacy. He published his Collected Poems in 2006, the mortality-obsessed Writers Writing Dying in 2012, and an uneven volume of prose poems, All at Once, in 2014. This retrospective rounds up poems from those and four other books published since the late 1990s, as well as a few new poems; these late poems are not unlike the dark, piercing, obsessive, long-lined earlier poems that made him famous, except that death is almost always closing in, the lens through which everything else - sex, family, history, even poetry - is viewed. "Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss?" he writes in "Haste," with an urgency designed to rush past all his inner censors, to get the poem out before it's too late. If some of these lines feel almost dashed off, they are never frivolous. These are some of the finest contemporary poems about the fear of dying and passionate desire for more life: "one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,/ another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was." (Sept.)