Falling Ill: Last Poems

Williams (1936–2015) adds to his celebrated oeuvre with a slim posthumous volume of frank and penetrating poems that track his experience of dying. Short, direct titles, often just a single word—“Diagnosis,” “Telling,” “Really,” “Next,” “Lonely,” “Life”—frame meditations on, or reckonings with, various aspects of illness and broader questions that death’s proximity evokes. The poems are profoundly plainspoken, guided by Williams’s knowledge that “my future tense is dissolving even as I watch” as well as an unshakable curiosity: “I find myself talking to death talking/ aloud asking questions in my real voice.” Each poem comprises five three-line stanzas in the loose iambic pentameter that feels like conversational English. An awareness of a fixed amount of time and space looms over the collection both formally and thematically. Countering this is the breathy and headlong effect of the unpunctuated lines. The reader feels sharply how bound together living and bearing witness have been for the poet, and, in turn, the silence that is inextricable from death: “saying goodbye can seem a diminishing/ a subtraction something that must never// be thought though it already has been/ and will be again but never allowed to reach/ the lips to pass into the realm of language.” The living can feel fortunate to have this clear-eyed document of a powerful writer grappling in earnest with his own demise. (Jan.)