Love about Love

The collected love poems of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. 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 a vital study of the evolution of a consciousness that is truth-telling, passionate, and profound.

Love About Love gathers under one roof the love poems written over a lifetime by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams. 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 fromearliest childhood longings to the hindsight of mature experience. Love About Love is a vital study of the evolution of a consciousness that is truth-telling, passionate, and profound.

Library Journal

On the heels of Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning Repair and just a few years after his Selected Poems comes this thematic repackaging of work spanning three decades. The focus is ostensibly love in all of its aspects, from childhood stirrings to adolescent lust to the layered complexities of adult relationships. But the real subject is Williams, since these earnest, prose-like interrogations are more like fevered diary entries or recordings from a therapist's couch ("The trouble with me is that whether I get love or not/ I suffer from it") than love poems. Like the late Harold Brodkey, Williams is committed to relentless self-analysis, to understanding his condition and articulating its every nuance ("I huddled there at the center of myself and tried to know by some/ reflexive act of faith/ that I'd survive all this, this thing, my self, that mauled and savaged me"). The wide range of experiences described is guaranteed to strike at least one nerve in any reader, but poetry this unabashedly self-absorbed and overdrawn will likely be of greatest interest to those who prize the stylistic precedents set by the confessional poets of the 1960s.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

C.K. Williams grew up in Newark, NJ and attended the University of Pennsylvania. He has written over a dozen books of poetry and been awarded many prizes, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Princeton University and lives part of the year in France.