All at Once

Pulling material from all periods and avenues of his life, Pulitzer Prize winner Williams (Wait) has aptly titled his 21st volume; a retrospective on love, art, and mortality, told in a voice dripping with equal parts nostalgia and self-interrogation. Keeping with his trademarked long, narrative lines, he muses on the minutiae of his life, keeping each vignette to a brief and tightly rendered prose poem, as if anxious to finish. At age 78, he acknowledges that this may very well be his last book: "here the end is almost upon me," he writes in "Mnemosyne". All the more reason to abandon the collection's disjointed nature in the second section, "Catherine's Laughter," to focus on a candid, loving portrayal of his French wife. Looking back on love, life, and art, Williams concludes that even now he has "no recognizable qualifications, and so was thrust into a nearly constant state of feeling... illicit, illegitimate, unentitled." The collection reads like a confessional, as in poems such as "Neither" he admits to the "perverse" enjoyment he gets from stealing condoms and smelling baby diapers. A master of poetics in his twilight years, Williams asks, "Aren't I still a thief, stealing some horde of language trash to justify my inner stink?" (Apr.)