SOURCE: “Recent Poetry,” in Stand Magazine, Vol. 35, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 77–84.

In the following excerpt, Saunders offers a generally positive assessment of A Dream of Mind, while noting that Williams's long lines and ordinary language occasionally fall flat.

Doubters who think [John] Ashbery reduces mental activity to a kind of effete daydreaming could try C. K. Williams's latest collection A Dream of Mind. Here the title sequence investigates ‘this mind streaming through me, its turbulent stillness, its murmur, inexorable, beguiling’ but at least sets out with ‘a dream of method,’ however intractable its potential application. He still believes that ‘these parcels of experience have a significance beyond their accumulation. … solutions are implied’ and is prepared to ‘butt in’ (‘Vocations’) to distill a kind of faith from ‘the fearful demands consciousness makes for linkage, coherence, congruence.’ The faith can only be ‘partial, imperfect,’ threatened by ‘imperious laws of doubt and...