Bjorn Sorensen's Reviews > Selected Poems

This is what poetry should be - unabashed, symbolic, conversational, creative and reflective of a view mainly outside of oneself in the sense that is has something to cause others to 'go outside', too. Stylistically, Williams is hard to beat - layers of subtle rhymes, repeats in the right places, the confidence to lay off the punctuation (except for the exclamation mark!) and very economical with word choice. The substance can be weighty, yet Williams is gracious enough to leave most interpretation up to the reader. He's humorous, energetic, and kind-hearted:

"Flowers By the Sea"

When over the flowery, sharp pasture's
edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form--chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement--or the shape
perhaps--of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem


Here, to me, flowers represent individuals - lovely, fragile and cranky, who could be overtaken by life's greater considerations (the ocean), but by some grace are left to live and grow. I grew slightly tired of the symbolism, though, and wanted work that was more edgy and personal. The book, consisting of sample poems from 16 of Williams's books, made up for that by ending with his well-known "Paterson", which wonderfully summarizes what he has said before yet mixes in playfulness, prose and connections, for example, between the humans and nature of his native New Jersey with a group of tribal women - several wives of one man in an African village. Williams has a certain calm that allows him to appreciate things as they are, yet never stops challenging the reader to invent his or her own reality:

... In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing...


Voices!
multiple and inarticulate . voices
clattering loudly to the sun, to
the clouds. Voices!
assaulting the air gaily from all sides.


Williams is well-rounded, often seeing the completeness that many ideologies and outlooks ignore. He knows, expects, that anything can happen, and tries to have his way only some of the time.