SOURCE: “A Leap Backwards,” in Times Literary Supplement, February 12, 1993, p. 11.

In the following review of A Dream of Mind, Norfolk praises Williams's “masterly” technical skill and his “extraordinary, magisterial” approach to unanswered philosophical questions.

C. K. Williams's work has never flinched from the difficulties and complications of American life. As his readership dips a cautious toe in the pleasant ambience of President Clinton's mysterious policies, Williams offers a vision of capability and purpose. This is poetry that can cope, it seems to say, that can deal with the uncertainties of its time. He is also being advocated as the latest answer to the perennial and destructive query, “Where, today, is American poetry at?” In A Dream of Mind, that question may have met its match.

Williams's sixth collection is divided into five parts which seem at first sight to bear little relation to each other. The first consists...